Art Spiegelman on Banning ‘Maus’

Art Spiegelman was shocked last year to hear that Maus, his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, had been banned in a school district in Tennessee.

Even more surprising was the rationale — not the violent history of his parents’ journey to Auschwitz chronicled in the memoir, but a single illustration of a “nude woman.” The picture depicted his dead mother in the bathtub after she committed suicide.

​Spiegelman joked, darkly, that schools wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach to children.

Read at PEN America