Maus Is Now the #1 Best Selling Book on Amazon After Outrage Over Tennessee School District Removing It from Curriculum

Maus by Art Spiegelman. Photo by MARO SIRANOSIAN/AFP via Getty Images.

Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, hit the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists in multiple categories after a Tennessee school district removed it from their curriculum.

The unanimous vote by the McMinn County, Tennessee School Board to remove Spiegelman’s b00k from their 8th-grade curriculum drew outrage. Transcripts of the school board meeting showed the members discussing their objections to language within the book like “God damn” and a depiction of a nude woman.

Spiegelman, a cartoonist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, created Maus to tell the story of his family’s experiences during the Holocaust, specifically his father. The book depicts Polish Jews like Spiegelman’s family as mice and the Nazis as cats. He blasted the school board’s move as a “daffily myopic response” to the content in his book.

As of Sunday afternoon, The Complete Maus (the hardcover edition, affiliate link) is the #1 Best Seller in the entire Books category on Amazon.

Screenshot via Amazon, dated Jan. 30, 2022.

The graphic novel is also available as two paperback volumes, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, which are ranked #3 and #7 respectively on Amazon’s list of Best Sellers in all Books at the time of publication.

The various editions are also dominating the top of the lists of Amazon Best Sellers in the History, Comics & Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels, Historical & Biographical Fiction Graphic Novels, and Biographies categories.

Many of the recent Amazon reviews expressly credit the McMinn County School Board’s decision for their purchase of the book. One such reviewer who identified as a “WWII era history buff of many years” wrote that she was “embarrassed” to have not heard of Maus previously until the controversy. “Thank you McMinn County SB for being the impetus to discover this masterpiece,” she wrote. “It will be a treasured addition to my WWII library.”

There are more purchases coming, many more. Richard Davis, the owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, launched a GoFundMe to purchase Maus for students. The original goal was to collect funds to be able to loan several copies to local students, but as donations continued to pour in, Davis expanded his goal to purchase as many copies as possible for students across the U.S.

As of Sunday, the GoFundMe had raised over $75,000.