Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate whose graphic memoir Maus (1991) is considered the most important work in the history of comics as serious literary art. Born in Stockholm in 1948 to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, Spiegelman grew up in Queens, New York, and studied art and philosophy at Harpur College. Maus, which depicts the Holocaust through Spiegelman's interviews with his father Vladek and renders Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, won the Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992—the first comic book ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize—and is credited with transforming public and critical understanding of what comics can achieve as narrative art. Spiegelman was also the co-founder and co-editor of Raw, the influential avant-garde comics anthology of the 1980s and 1990s, and contributed iconic cover illustrations to The New Yorker. Spiegelman received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2022. He is a vocal advocate for artistic freedom and has been a prominent voice against censorship of Maus, which has faced attempts to remove it from school curricula in several states. He lives in New York.