Art Spiegelman, author and illustrator of Maus, tells Don Swaim in this 1991 interview about the launching of his career in writing for underground comics. Spiegelman got his start by writing for underground comics that had mature subject matter for adults in a magazine he founded called Raw.

After some success, Spiegelman decided to write Maus, a satire on the Nazi occupation depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book was based on the experiences of his parents as concentration-camp survivors. Maus's success eventually earned Art Spiegelman the Pulitzer Prize.

Growing up, Spiegelman heard about nightmarish anecdotes about the concentration camps from his mother but nothing chronological. It was his father who offered horrid details of his experiences in the camps.

Spiegelman would like to do another project similar to Maus, but he fears everything will be compared to it may never live up to Maus. But, he still has a desire to explore this format of words and drawings.

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat. His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.