Maus

Summary

Maus is a groundbreaking graphic novel that tells the story of the Holocaust through an inventive allegorical lens: Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and other groups given similar anthropomorphic forms. At its heart, it is the biography of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, as told to his son Art. The book moves between Vladek’s harrowing past in Nazi-occupied Europe and Art’s strained relationship with his aging father in present-day America. Through these dual timelines, Maus becomes not only a chronicle of survival but also a meditation on memory, trauma, and the act of storytelling itself. The allegory strips away none of the horror; instead, it heightens the absurd cruelty of a world organized by prejudice and extermination. Maus was the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, cementing its place as one of the most significant works in modern literature.