Art Spiegelman's Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust

I n presenting a "Special Award" to Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1992, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to finesse the issue of genre. The members were apparently befuddled by a project whose merit hey could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize. The obvious rubric (Biography) seemed ill-suited for a comic book in an age when ever-larger tomes and ever-denser scholarship define that enterprise. Editorial cartooning didn't quite fit either, for Maus illustrated not the news of the day but events of the past. The classification problem had earlier bedeviled the New York Times Book Review, where the work had criss-crossed the Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists. Originally, Maus was placed on the Fiction List, a decision Spiegelman protested in a wry letter to the editor: "If your list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent hat 'fiction' indicates awork isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe Imight have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelist's tructure."1 Ina tiny but telling blip on the cultural radar, the Times obligingly moved the volume from the Fiction to Non-Fiction Best Seller List. The veracity of the image-even the comic book image-had attained parity with the word. From its first appearance in 1980 in the comic magazine Raw ("High Culture for Lowbrows") to the complete two-volume edition issued in 1991, Maus presented an unsettling aesthetic and scholarly challenge, not least to print-oriented purists who scoffed at the notion of comic book artistry and bewailed the incursion of pop culture into the under-