Vladek begs Art not to include this in the book and Art reluctantly agrees. Vladek tells of his time in the Polish city of Częstochowa and how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a manufacturer. Art asks Vladek to recount his Holocaust experiences. Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide of Art's mother Anja in 1968. His father responds in broken English, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!" Īs an adult, Art visits his father, from whom he has become estranged. When he returns home, he finds his father Vladek, who asks him why he is upset, and Art proceeds to tell him that his friends left him behind.
In Rego Park in 1958, a young Art Spiegelman is skating with his friends when he falls down and hurts himself, but his friends keep going. The story that Vladek tells unfolds in the narrative past, which begins in the mid-1930s and continues until the end of the Holocaust in 1945. In the frame tale of the narrative present, Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City in 1978–79. Most of the book weaves in and out of two timelines.
Maus was one of the first graphic novels to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world. A collected volume of the first six chapters that appeared in 1986 brought the book mainstream attention a second volume collected the remaining chapters in 1991. He serialized Maus from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, who also appears in Maus. The recorded interviews became the basis for the graphic novel, which Spiegelman began in 1978. The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, structure, and page layouts.Ī three-page strip also called "Maus" that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who took her own life when he was 20. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material for the Maus project he is preparing. In 1992, it became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters). Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, the English as fish, the French as frogs, and the Swedish as deer. Serialized from 1980 to 1991, it depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman.