Maus (graphic novel)
Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman which recounts his father's struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew, while also following the author's 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, as the Pulitzer committee could not decide whether to categorize it as fiction or biography.
The author/artist portrays different groups of people anthropomorphically as different species of animals: Jews are portrayed as mice (German: Maus), Germans as cats, French as frogs, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and so on. This was both a familiar device from children's cartoons and an ironic nod to Nazi propaganda images that depicted Jews as rats and Poles as pigs etc. Publication in Poland was delayed because of this anthropological device, though the story is realistically presented.
Most of the book was serialized in the Spiegelman-edited RAW magazine. It was then published in two parts, (volume 1, "My Father Bleeds History"; volume 2, "And Here My Troubles Began") before eventually being integrated into a single volume.
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