SOURCE: Doherty, Thomas. “Art Spiegelman's Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust.” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 69-84.

In the following essay, Doherty examines how Maus utilizes the visual medium of the comic book as a means of depicting the Holocaust and compares the work to various cinematic representations of the Holocaust.

In 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 they 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...