Spiegelman responded with a letter to the editor: 'if you list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe I might 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 structure' (Doherty 69).

The New York Times obliged and took Maus off the Fiction Best Seller List and moved it over to the Non-Fiction Best Seller List.

In his 1998 article, "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History," author James E. Young states that Maus embodies an "aesthetics of postmemory" (669). Maus also suggests itself as a model for "received history -- a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the ways they are passed down to us" (669).

Young goes on to say that Spiegelman, like others who live in this media-savvy generation, born after -- but indelibly shaped by -- the Holocaust, he never tries to represent event he never knew immediately, "but instead portrays his necessarily hypermediated experience of the memory of events" (669). This generation...

All we know about the Holocaust is what the people who have experienced it have passed down to us or what they have left in the form of diaries.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale is not the story about the Holocaust but rather it is about the artist-son's recovery of it. Spiegelman said, "Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story…[it is} an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals" (670). Essentially, Maus is a story about a father remembering what happened to him at the hands of Nazis and his son Artie remembering what happened to him at the hands of his father's telling of those memories (670).

Works Cited

Doherty, Thomas. "Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Graphic Art and the Holocaust."

American Literature,68(1), 1996, pp. 69-84.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Pantheon; 1st

edition, 1986.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon;

1st edition, 1992.

Young, James E. "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History." Critical Inquiry,24(3), 1998, pp. 666-699.