The 1986 graphic novel by Art Spiegelman banned in a Tennessee school district in 2022 is Maus.
Maus presents the Holocaust through Spiegelman’s interviews with his father, Vladek, a Polish Jewish survivor. Jews are represented as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and other groups through animal imagery. The first volume, Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, was published in 1986; the complete two-volume work appeared in 1991.
In January 2022, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board voted 10–0 to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum. Board members cited profanity, a nude drawing, violence, murder, and suicide, although the book’s subject is the Holocaust and its historical value was widely defended. The decision attracted international attention and drove a sharp increase in sales. Maus is often called a graphic novel, but its Pulitzer Prize in 1992 also made it a landmark work of serious historical and literary nonfiction.