It’s the birthday of author and illustrator Art Spiegelman (b. 1948), whose work Maus (1986) was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, thus establishing that graphic novels could be a serious literary genre. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, a Holocaust survivor, using cats as Nazis and mice as Jews.

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, but grew up in Queens, New York, after his family moved to the U.S. in 1951. Both his parents were Auschwitz survivors. Spiegelman also had an older brother who died during the war at the age of six: he was poisoned by an aunt, who also poisoned herself, to avoid being sent to the gas chambers. Spiegelman studied at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and later at SUNY Binghamton but left college when his mother committed suicide in 1968. He wrote comic strips for the underground comix movement of the 1970s, including one exploring his mother’s suicide, and these were collected in 1977 in the book Breakdowns.

In 1980, Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, co-founded the anthology Raw, which for over ten years published his comix and the work of European artists as well. Maus previewed in this anthology but was a hard sell to publishers, because who in their right mind would publish a comic book about the Holocaust? Pantheon Books, as it turns out, but they only gave Spiegelman a tiny little advance. To everyone’s surprise, the book became a bestseller. The second volume of Maus appeared in 1991, and the two volumes were published together in The Complete Maus in 1996. Spiegelman received his “special” Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (as opposed to all those ordinary old Pulitzers you and I have lying around in our closets). MetaMaus (2011), published on the 25th anniversary of Maus, reproduces among other things all the rejection letters Spiegelman received for Maus from New York’s big publishers. So. That’s kind of satisfying, unless you’re one of those publishers, and then it’s kind of embarrassing.

Fun fact: Spiegelman’s daughter, Nadja Spiegelman, published a memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, in 2016, recounting four generations of women on her mother’s side. It is revealed in the book that her mother (Françoise) is a Somewhat Difficult Woman, and I for one cannot wait until the day my own children pool their collective literary resources and publish a memoir hanging *me* out to dry. (Yes, they get too much sugar, and no, it’s never enough.)

Spiegelman, who has also created more than 20 covers for The New Yorker, is adamant that Maus isn’t “Auschwitz for Beginners” just because it’s a comic book. In fact, he once said in a comic strip that giving Maus to a child is child abuse.

Have a brilliant Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.