The writer Don Swaim, author of several historical novels, has written a novel about one of the most turbulent eras in the world: the 1920s. It covers the last years of this period up to the crisis of 1929.

“Jitterbuggin’ with the Renaissance: a Jazz Age Epic” is published by Montag Press, San Francisco, and is available from Amazon.com.

Swaim is the founder of the Bucks County Writers Workshop, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, and co-founder and executive editor of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this year.

In the 1920s, reporter Gart Asquith, a protégé of H.L. Mencken, travels to New York to learn about the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. There he rubs shoulders with gangsters, befriends poet Countee Cullen, and falls in love with Zora Neale Hurston. Gart’s other antics include kidnapping Fats Waller to perform at Al Capone’s birthday party, risking arrest as a liquor smuggler from Cuba, hunting a serial killer in silent Hollywood, and infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the great figures of the Jazz Age make cameos, including George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shipwreck Kelly. Meanwhile, Gart’s mentor Mencken, the era’s leading critic, gives free rein to his unbridled cynicism about politics, religion, and social presumptuousness. The novel’s title refers to a poem by Langston Hughes, one of the most important poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Mencken’s role in the novel is not his first appearance in one of Swaim’s works of fiction. “He was the central character in my first published book, The HL Mencken Murder Case, which came out with St. Martin’s Press in the 1980s,” Swaim said.

Swaim explores the Depression in “Man With Two Faces,” the story of a wandering soldier of fortune, also published by Montag, but considers his most ambitious published work to be his sprawling fictional biography, “The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story,” which spans more than 70 years and begins in the 1840s.

“Unlike many authors, I rarely write autobiographically,” Swaim said, preferring the challenge of research and detail that goes into shedding light on the times and lives of both well-known and unusual figures from the past.

When the Bucks County Writers Workshop and the Doylestown Historical Society launched the magazine Neshaminy, Swaim said he made sure it included fiction as well as poetry and art.

“Fiction often explores the past in a colorful and very personal way that nonfiction can’t,” says Swaim. “Fiction even has the ability to explore deeper truths and depths of emotion that go far beyond the facts. And when the writing is good, it’s fun.”

Join our readers whose generous donations enable you to read our reporting. Help keep local journalism alive and strengthen our community.