The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1997)

Won: Special Pulitzer Prize, 1992. The Pulitzer board honored Art Spiegelman's account of his father's survival of Auschwitz with a special award rather than a prize in one of its book categories. That awkwardness is the point: it is the moment a major American literary institution admitted a comic could stand among its books, without yet knowing where to put it. Read the two volumes together in this complete edition, since the frame story of Spiegelman interviewing his father in Queens matters as much as the wartime chapters. Its mice-and-cats device sounds glib until you meet it on the page, where it becomes a constant reminder of how people were sorted and labeled.