Jerry Sweeney is a transplanted New Yorker living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His interests revolve around the arts in America, especially its literature, dance companies and classical music. He is blest with three children and seven grandchildren.

Eagles Rising details the evolution of the Irish Mahoneys from rural Iowa to a stormy life in Chicago. The story chronicles how they become unwitting participants in the city's labor, gangster and race wars. Martin and his son John-Arthur, a soldier in WWI, who is haunted by an aborted anarchist plot in his youth, are thwarted from finding solace in an urban existence. This South Side neighborhood novel involves the moxie girl who becomes John-Arthur's bride; it portrays as well his nemesis from the Prairie Avenue Gang, and his extraordinary friend, a vaudeville magician, who happens to be a Wizard.

Eagles Rising is the first of seven stand-alone novels, a series called "The Columbiad", exploring the lives of the Mahoneys as they tangle through the social, economic, intellectual and artistic tangle of the 20th Century.