Mao II

Mao II is a novel by the American writer Don DeLillo, published in 1991. It is his tenth novel, and its title comes from the silk-screen prints of Mao Zedong that Andy Warhol made, which are the images of the leader multiplied into a crowd.

Bill Gray is the novelist at the centre of the book. He has become a recluse, working endlessly on a manuscript that he chooses not to finish, because he and his assistant Scott believe that something is lost once a mass audience reads a piece of writing. He is photographed, against his own habits, by a New York photographer who is documenting writers. The book is interested in what crowds do to individuals, and in what a photograph does to the person it shows.

The book is concerned with crowds as much as with individuals, and with the way political violence and the mass media work on both. DeLillo dedicated it to his friend Gordon Lish. The novel was well received, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.