Maus is a graphic novel written and illustrated Art Spiegelman and published from as a serialized comic strip that ran from 1980 to 1991. The story is a recounting of Spiegelman's father's experience as a Holocaust survivor, as well as Spiegelman's interviews with his father on the subject. Despite the dark, often monstrous, material covered in the story, all the characters are drawn as anthropomorphic animals, with Jewish mice, German cats, American dogs, and Polish pigs. Maus is a complex, layered story dealing with racism, identity, and memory. Because the comic appeared in chapters over a span of eleven years, the story of its own creation in part of the narrative-for example, the response to the publication of the first collected volume is described in the second volume. Maus has been cited in hundreds of academic works and has won several awards, including the first Pulitzer Prize ever given to a graphic novel.