Mao II was published by the Viking Press, New York, on 4 June 1991, in a first printing priced at $19.95. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992. Its central argument — that the novelist’s power to influence consciousness has been usurped by the terrorist — was controversial and prescient. DeLillo published it a decade before September 11, 2001, and the novel became, in retrospect, one of the most prophetic American fictions of the late twentieth century.
The Novel
Bill Gray is a celebrated American novelist who has not published in over twenty years. He lives in isolation in a house in rural New York, attended by his assistant Scott Martineau and Scott’s girlfriend Karen Janney (a former Moonie). Gray is working — perpetually, hopelessly — on a novel he cannot finish.
A photographer named Brita Nilsson persuades Gray to sit for a portrait. This small act of emergence catalyses a larger one: Gray becomes involved in a scheme to negotiate the release of a Swiss poet held hostage by a militant group in Beirut. He travels to London, then to Athens, then toward Lebanon. He is injured in a hit-and-run accident in Athens and dies alone on a ferry crossing. His body is not identified.
The novel’s argument unfolds through Gray’s meditations and through the novel’s juxtaposition of different forms of crowd behaviour: a Moonie mass wedding at Yankee Stadium, a Tiananmen Square protest, a Khomeini funeral in Tehran, a Beirut street crowd. In each case, individuals dissolve into collective identity — which is what the terrorist (and the cult leader, and the totalitarian state) achieves by other means.
The Novelist vs. the Terrorist
Gray articulates the novel’s thesis directly: “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists… Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” This is not a celebration of terrorism but a diagnosis of cultural exhaustion — the novel’s territory has been colonised by mass media, spectacular violence, and the globalised image. The reclusive novelist, retreating into silence, concedes defeat.
Collecting Mao II
First edition (1991, Viking): First printing, $19.95.
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $20–$50
Value trajectory: Moderate. The novel is critically admired but lacks the commercial footprint of White Noise or Underworld. Its prophetic quality — the terrorism thesis, the media critique — has enhanced its scholarly reputation, and signed copies are sought by DeLillo specialists. The cover photograph by DeLillo’s frequent collaborator is a bonus for collectors interested in book design.
After September 11
DeLillo’s subsequent novel, Falling Man (2007), dealt directly with the September 11 attacks. But many critics argued that Mao II was the more prescient and powerful response — written before the event, it anticipated the mechanism by which terrorism would come to dominate American consciousness. The novel does not predict 9/11 specifically, but it predicts the cultural condition that made 9/11 so traumatic: the novelist’s inability to compete with the image of the falling tower.
Brita Nilsson and the Photograph
The photographer Brita begins the novel photographing reclusive writers — capturing images of people who have rejected the image economy. By the novel’s end, she is photographing terrorist leaders in Beirut. The shift is the novel’s structural argument in miniature: the significant faces of our time are no longer writers but men of violence. DeLillo’s own cover photograph — a crowd scene — reinforces the theme: the individual face dissolves into the mass.
The Crowd Scenes
DeLillo structures the novel around images of crowds: the Moonie mass wedding (individuality dissolved in religious ecstasy), the Tiananmen Square protests (individuality asserted against the state), the Khomeini funeral (grief as political spectacle), the Beirut street crowd (violence as daily texture). Each crowd represents a different relationship between the individual and the collective, and DeLillo’s interest is in the mechanism of dissolution — how an individual becomes a cell in a larger organism. This theme connects Mao II to White Noise (the evacuation) and Underworld (the baseball crowd) and runs through DeLillo’s entire body of work.
Projected Values (2026–2036)
Moderate continued appreciation. Mao II is a specialist’s DeLillo — admired by scholars and serious readers, less well known to the general public. Signed copies should reach $1,000–$2,000 as the novel’s prescient quality continues to attract attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Bill Gray based on anyone? Gray is a composite. The reclusive novelist evokes Salinger, Pynchon, and DeLillo himself — all of whom have resisted public exposure. Gray’s inability to finish his novel recalls the later careers of Salinger and Ralph Ellison. DeLillo has denied any direct identification.
What does the title mean? The title refers to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen series of Mao Zedong portraits — images that simultaneously mass-produced and emptied the dictator’s image of meaning. DeLillo’s point is that the age of mechanical reproduction has changed the nature of both power and art: the image replaces the reality, and the reproduction replaces the original.
Is the terrorism thesis still relevant? More relevant than ever. DeLillo’s argument that terrorism has replaced literature as the primary shaper of consciousness has been confirmed by the cultural centrality of September 11, the ISIS media strategy, and the general dominance of spectacle over reflection in twenty-first-century culture.