Lafayette
In this gripping biography, acclaimed author Harlow Giles Unger paints an intimate portrait of the heroic young French soldier who, at 19, renounced a life of luxury in Paris and Versailles to fight and bleed for liberty - at Brandywine, Valley Forge, and Yorktown. A major general in the Continental Army, he quickly earned the love of his troops, his fellow commanders, and his commander in chief, George Washington, who called him his "adopted son".
Unger follows Lafayette from the battlefields of North America to the palace of Versailles, where the marquis won the most stunning diplomatic victory in world history - convincing the French court to send the huge military and naval force needed to win American independence. He then returned to America to lead the remarkable guerrilla campaign in Virginia that climaxed with the British surrender at Yorktown.
Lafayette's triumph turned to tragedy, however, when he tried to introduce American democracy in his native land. His quest for a constitutional monarchy unwittingly set off the French Revolution and plunged Europe into more than a decade of slaughter and war. Declared an enemy of the state, Lafayette fled France only to be imprisoned for five years in an Austrian dungeon, while his wife, Adrienne, and her family festered in prison, awaiting the cruel blade of the guillotine.
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Book details
- Author
- Harlow Giles Unger
- Imprint
- Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Pages
- 480
- Formats
- Paperback, Hardcover
- Subjects
- Biography & Autobiography › Historical
- Topics
- Marquis de Lafayette · American Revolution · French history · Revolutionary War biography · Founding Era · George Washington · Franco-American alliance · military history
- ISBN-13
- 9780471468851 (Paperback)9780471394327 (Hardcover)
About the author
HARLOW GILES UNGER was an American author, historian, journalist, broadcaster, and educator who wrote more than twenty-six books, including biographies of Lafayette, Patrick Henry, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and John Marshall.
Unger’s book Lafayette won the American Revolution Round Table Book Prize and a Daughters of the American Revolution book award. He also received recognition for his three-volume Encyclopedia of American Education. A graduate of Yale University, he served as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in American History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Before writing books, Unger worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune Overseas News Service in Paris, and later as an American political and economic affairs analyst for The Times and The Sunday Times of London. That experience across continents shaped his focus on American history and its founding figures.