Jitterbuggin' with the Renaissance: A Jazz Age Epic

by Don Swaim

Bootleggers, Al Capone, bathtub gin, speakeasies, the Klan, mah-jongg, the Lindy, flagpole sitting, rumble seats, silent movies, and flappers. A fictive frolic through the Roaring Twenties as seen through the eyes of a young undercover reporter mentored by the era’s key intellectual, H.L. Mencken, who unleashes his cynicism in all its vitriol. Clarence Darrow, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, George Gershwin, Aimee Semple McPherson, Fats Waller, and F. Scott Fitzgerald do their part in the story as the Jazz Age reaches its crushing climax.

Jitterbuggin’ with the A Jazz Age Epic “...is a triumph on every level. Don Swaim leads us through some of the most vivid events of the 1920s—from Al Capone’s stranglehold on Chicago to murders in Hollywood to the stock market crash—in a narrative that is as vibrant and rollicking as the decade he is portraying. And throughout, we are regaled by H. L. Mencken’s nose-thumbing of politics, religion, and American culture in general. If you can only read one novel about the Roaring Twenties, this should be it.”
—S. T. Joshi, leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L. Mencken, and winner of the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, British Fantasy awards

Great wit, clever prose, and an exhilarating story that, sadly, also displays the outrage of racism. Easy to lose oneself in the language, the humor, and the lore, and the real people who lived it. The wild, audacious events that populate this love letter to a courageous time and place in history are price-less.
—Chris Bauer, author of the Maximum Risk series, the Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners series, and the Counsel Fungo series

Jitterbuggin’ with the Renaissance has all the hallmarks of a Don Swaim perfectly drawn characters who insert themselves in absurd situations at their own peril, explorations of mostly forgotten historical events and figures well worth revisiting, and gorgeous writing that compels the reader to turn the page as quickly as he can.
—William J. Donahue, author of Only Monsters Remain

272 pages, Paperback

Published June 8, 2024

About the author

Don Swaim is a writer, novelist, journalist, and winner of the 2011 Pearl S. Buck short story prize. His novel, The H.L. Mencken Murder Case (St. Martin's Press), was republished as a trade paperback under the Authors Guild's Back in Print program. Born in Kansas and educated in Ohio, his daily feature "Book Beat" was broadcast on major radio stations through the CBS Radio Stations News Service, and can be heard on the Internet at Wired for Books and at Book Beat:The Podcast. After a career at CBS in New York and Baltimore, Swaim founded the Bucks County Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. He edits the web's definitive Ambrose Bierce Site. His fiction and articles have been published in small magazines and on the web.

Reviews

[William Donahue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I read from this author is uniformly fantastic. Know how when you read a book so beautiful and insightful and you wonder, "How did he/she pull that off?" That's this book ... and pretty much everything else I've read from this author. I honestly never thought I would want to read a novel about the Roaring Twenties, and that's the amazing thing about what Don Swaim does: He creates characters so realistic you can practically see and touch them, and then wraps the story around their adventures and perils. Can't wait to see what he does next.

[C.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible prose, such clever dialogue, and some disconcerting circumstances for a young writer trying to navigate a world not enamored with his existence because of the mores of the day. Characters of all makes, shapes, sizes, genders, race, and musical proclivities populate this very creative story. A keeper.