Teacher Guide

MAUS Lesson Plan

Introduction to MAUS

Art Spiegelman's Maus took the literary world by storm when it was published (part I in 1987 and part II in 1991), garnering Spiegelman a special Pulitzer prize for Letters and rendering him one of America's most prominent graphic writers. To this day it remains at the forefront of the canon of Holocaust literature.

Maus is a curiously incongruous book: an extended comic about the Holocaust. Spiegelman portrayed the different races and nationalities within the story as different species of animals: Jews are portrayed as mice, Germans are cats and Poles are pigs (which led to protests as recent as 2001 in Poland). Maus was first published in an underground comic magazine called...

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