John Mulgan (1911-1945), one of the most attractive figures of his war-time generation, had a brief but distinguished career as a scholar at Auckland and Oxford, as a journalist and publisher, and as a soldier in Africa and Greece. His literary reputation rests on two comparatively short books of continuing impact, the bleak novel 'Man Alone', and the deeply-felt memoir 'Report on Experience'. The real nature of his achievement both as man and writer, and the reasons for his mysterious death by suicide in Cairo at the end of the war, are re-examined here.