author
Best known for a vivid First World War novel that drew on his own service, this elusive British writer left behind a small body of work with an outsized reputation. His most famous book is remembered for its plainspoken realism and its unusually direct portrait of soldiers' lives.
by William Manning
William Manning was a British writer best known for The Middle Parts of Fortune, a novel shaped by his experience as a soldier in the First World War. The book was first published in a limited private edition in 1929 and later appeared in a more widely circulated form under the title Her Privates We.
Readers and critics have continued to value Manning's work for its immediacy, dark humor, and unsentimental picture of army life. Although he is far less famous than many other war writers, his reputation has endured because that novel is often seen as one of the most striking literary accounts of the war from the ordinary soldier's point of view.
Reliable biographical details about Manning are relatively scarce compared with the lasting attention given to his writing, which adds to the sense of him as a somewhat shadowy figure behind a remarkable book.