[1] Lafourcade was a member of the so-called "Generation of the '50s", a term suggested by Lafourcade himself in 1954 to describe authors born between 1920 and 1934 who began to flourish in the 1950s, writers who departed in content and style from the previous regional style known as "Criollismo"; and more widely within the "boom generation" in Latin America, also known as Latin American Boom, a generation of writers who produced an explosion of works in the mid-20th century and decades that followed, which included five Nobel Prize winners: Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) in 1967, Pablo Neruda (Chile) in 1971, Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) in 1982, Octavio Paz (Mexico) in 1990, and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) in 2010, and several other influential intellectual authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar in Argentina.

For years he wrote an editorial for the newspaper El Mercurio (the largest in the country), focusing on literature but with incursions into politics, cultural issues and subjects of impact upon the nation.

Some of his most critical articles, written in an often mordant style, as well as various public discourses, angered dictators and politicians in Chile and other Latin American countries and resulted in tension with the authorities, including an episode where his bookstore was stormed by force and all the remaining copies of his book El Taimado (The Stubborn Man, a satire of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, then still in power) were withdrawn.

For some time he wrote a gastronomic review under the name of "Conde de Lafourchette" ("fourchette" meaning "fork" in French) in El Mercurio, in which he gave his uncensored opinion about restaurants and their food.

He was believed to have as many enemies as he had friends, to the point that for years rumors circulated of a group of people gathering signatures to "expel Lafourcade from Chile".