About this Item
New York: Pantheon Books, 1997 [issued 19 November 1996]. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF THE FIRST ONE-VOLUME EDITION of the complete work, with a complete number line including 1. SIGNED BY ART SPIEGELMAN on the verso of the front free endpaper. Tall octavo, 296 pages, illustrated throughout by Spiegelman. Publisher's original black cloth-backed boards; original pictorial dust jacket retaining the publisher's $35.00 price, with the red "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" medallion on the front panel.
The edition distinction is important. This is not the first book appearance of either part of Maus: My Father Bleeds History was published separately in 1986, followed by And Here My Troubles Began in 1991. It is the first printing in which Spiegelman's complete narrative was issued as a single physical work, bringing the two volumes together within one continuously paginated book.
Maus emerged from the experimental culture of RAW, the avant-garde comics magazine founded by Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly in 1980. What began as interviews recorded between Spiegelman and his father, Vladek, became a work at once documentary history, family memoir, survivor testimony, and an examination of how trauma passes from one generation to the next. Jews appear as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, yet the visible masks resist any suggestion that the Holocaust can be recovered transparently through realistic representation; documentary fragments, family photographs, and the conspicuous act of drawing expose both the history being narrated and the imperfect means of reconstructing it. Marianne Hirsch's influential concept of "postmemory" was developed in direct engagement with Maus. The Pulitzer board awarded Maus a Special Citation in 1992, and the work became the first graphic narrative to receive a Pulitzer Prize - confirmation that a work in comics could sustain the documentary, autobiographical, and ethical ambitions traditionally claimed for literature. Its continuing presence in classrooms, bestseller lists, and censorship disputes demonstrates a living cultural text rather than a merely commemorated classic.
PROVENANCE: Private collection, United States.
CONDITION: Fine. A bright, clean copy in the original dust jacket, retaining the publisher's $35.00 price and red Pulitzer medallion. No condition issues, markings, annotations, repairs, restoration, or material trimming are known. The signature is clear and well placed on the verso of the front free endpaper.
LITERATURE: Spiegelman, MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (2011); Hirsch, "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory," Discourse 15.2 (1992-93); Rothberg, Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994); Doherty, American Literature 68.1 (1996); Young, Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998); Chute, "The Shadow of a Past Time," Twentieth Century Literature 52.2 (2006); Chute, Disaster Drawn (2016); Martin Sanz, Anclajes 26.2 (2022).
A signed first printing of the first one-volume edition of The Complete Maus: Spiegelman's Pulitzer-recognized masterpiece, uniting survivor testimony, family memory, and graphic documentary form in the original priced dust jacket.
Atelier Zweig - L403.
Seller Inventory # L403
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