Art Spiegelman, the son of Holocaust survivors, is one of the most prominent "second-generation" creators of depictions of the Holocaust and an important contemporary American sequential artist. Since the 1970s he has produced intellectually intriguing comics and illustrations. His covers for The New Yorker have occasionally been controversial, and he has co-edited collections of children's stories as well as illustrating several books. His major Holocaust work, Maus, A Survivor's Tale (1986, 1991), is a graphic novel, an extended comic book that treats serious subjects in greater depth and with a wider variety of techniques than is possible in the severely circumscribed popular comic book. Despite its designation as a "novel," that is, a work of fiction, the graphic novel is not exclusively limited to fiction but often includes autobiography, biography, and other forms of verifiable narrative.

Arthur Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 15 February 1948, to refugees Vladek and Anja...