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Introduction

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is an autobiography by Art Spiegelman, told using the comics form. Parts of the story were originally published in the magazine RAW between 1980 to 1991. The complete story was published in two volumes: the first in 1986 ("My Father Bleeds History") and the second in 1991 ("And Here My Troubles Began").^[1] The graphic novel as a whole took thirteen years to complete. It recounts the struggle of Spiegelman's father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his recollections of his experiences. All people are presented as anthropomorphic animals. (For example, all Jews are depicted as mice; hence the title Maus, which is German for "mouse".)

The book includes one of Spiegelman's earlier comics that describes the events surrounding his mother's suicide. It also delves on his troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. The New York Times described the selection of Maus for the honor: "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify."^[2]