The Boys' Life of Lafayette

There is something irrestible about a nineteen-year-old aristocrat who burns his family fortune on a desperate gamble for liberty. This is the story of the Marquis de Lafayette: born to a line of warriors, orphaned young, and determined to find glory in a cause greater than himself. When he sails for America in 1777, he carries nothing but a borrowed horse and a conviction that will not die. Helen Nicolay's classic biography, first published in 1920, traces that extraordinary journey from the court of Louis XVI to the blood-soaked fields of Yorktown, from the barricades of the French Revolution to a grateful nation's embrace. But this is more than military chronicle. It is the story of a young wife who never complained while her husband crossed an ocean to fight tyranny, of the sacred friendship between Lafayette and Washington, and of a man who spent his entire life believing that freedom was worth any cost. The book that taught generations of American families who Lafayette was and why he still matters.