Barton Swaim

Contributing Columnist

Washington Post and Wall Street Journal

Barton Swaim is a contributing columnist to the Washington Post and writes a bi-monthly column on political books for the Wall Street Journal. From 2007 to 2011 he worked as a speechwriter for South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford—an experience he wrote about in his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (Simon & Schuster, 2015). He writes on politics, language, and literature for the Los Angeles Times, the Weekly Standard, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Criterion, and other publications. Barton is also the author of Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere (Bucknell, 2009), a book based on his doctoral thesis in English at Edinburgh University. He is married with three daughters and lives in Columbia, South Carolina. @bartonswaim