Why did art spiegelman write maus
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Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is best known for his masterful graphic novel, Maus, a two-volume Holocaust narrative that portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, telling the story of his parents’ survival as Polish Jews in the Nazi death camps and of their troubled lives in America after the war. In 1992, Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for the completion of Maus, which, at the time, didn’t fit into any of the Prize’s standard categories. In 2009, Maus was chosen by the Young Adult Library Association as one of its recommended titles for all students. And in 2020, the New York Public Library voted Maus one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years.
Having rejected his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning at New York’s High School of Art and Design and began drawing professionally at age sixteen. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton) before being expelled in 1968. He received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the university in 1995. His comics are best known for
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Art Spiegelman
American cartoonist (born 1948)
Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman (SPEE-gəl-mən; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.[3]
Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these stri
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Art Spiegelman
Biography
Following his work illustrating the popular Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, in 1986 Art Spiegelman (b.1948) turned his focus to the autobiographical memoir, Maus. After interviewing his father, a holocaust survivor, about his experiences being imprisoned by the Nazis, Spiegelman serialized the story in Raw, an underground comics magazine.
Maus reflects on his father’s experiences during World War II, living as a prisoner in Jewish Ghettos in Poland, awaiting certain death in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and struggling as a Holocaust survivor. In depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, Spiegelman provides the reader with forceful, personal images of the Holocaust.
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Illustrations by Art Spiegelman
Additional Resources
Bibliography
Spiegelman, Art. Be a Nose!: Three Sketchbooks. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's, 2009.
Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
Spiegelman, Art. In
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