Having rejected his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College before becoming part of the underground comix subculture of the 60s and 70s. As creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co. from 1965-1987, Spiegelman created Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items, and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 1980, Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine.  Maus was originally serialized in the pages of RAW. They've more recently co-edited Little Lit, a series of three comics anthologies for children published by HarperCollins ("Comics-They're not just for Grown-ups Anymore") and Big Fat Little Lit, collecting the three comics into one volume. Currently, he is an advisor and contributor to TOON Books, a series of early readers in comics format published by Mouly. With Mouly, he has coedited A TOON Treasury of Classic Children¹s Comics, to be published in the Fall of 2009 by Abrams.

Spiegelman¹s work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. In 2004 he completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages, In the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books. A book version of these highly political works was published by Pantheon in the United States, appeared on many national bestseller lists, and was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004. Pantheon has also published Spiegelman¹s illustrated version of the 1928 lost classic, The Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March.

Spiegelman¹s most recent work includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology, Breakdowns (fall 2008); it includes an autobiographical comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself, entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; as well as the TOON Book Jack and the Box. Additionally, in preparation is a book with a DVD about the making of Maus, entitled Meta Maus. In 2009 McSweeney’s published a collection of three of his sketchbooks entitled Be a Nose.  A major exhibition of his work was arranged by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the "15 Masters of 20th Century Comics" exhibit (November 2005). In 2005, Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier de l¹Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and the American equivalent (played himself on an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2008).