author
Georges Lafond
b. 1881
Best remembered for vivid wartime writing and books on Latin America, this French author brought firsthand urgency to everything he wrote. His work ranges from a soldier’s-eye view of World War I to lively studies of Argentina and Simón Bolívar.
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About the author
Georges Lafond was a French author active in the early to mid-20th century. Library records identify him as French and list him as the author of dozens of works, though basic life details remain incomplete in the sources I found: some catalogs give his birth simply as 1881, while the Bibliothèque nationale de France records his dates only broadly as born in the 1800s and died in the 1900s.
He is best known in English for Covered with Mud and Glory, published in 1918 as a translation of Ma mitrailleuse. Contemporary catalog notes describe him as Sergeant-Major Georges Lafond and say he served with the Territorial Hussars before joining a machine-gun section of the Colonial Infantry, which helps explain the book’s close-up view of front-line life.
His interests clearly reached beyond the battlefield. Catalog and publisher records connect him with books such as L'effort français en Amérique latine (1917), La France en Amérique latine (1922), L'Argentine au travail (1929/1930), La vie de Simon Bolivar (with Gabriel Tersane, 1930), Bolivar et la libération de l'Amérique du Sud (1931), and Géographie économique de l'Amérique latine (1947). Together, these works suggest a writer deeply engaged with Latin American history, politics, and economic life.