Swados's parents, Aaron (a doctor) and Rebecca Bluestone (a pianist, singer, and painter), had Russian Jewish origins. In 1936 he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for creative writing. As a high school student and an undergraduate, he had been a member of the Young Communist League, converting to Trotskyism in the late 1930s. He worked as an aircraft riveter after graduating and served in the Merchant Marine between 1943 and 1946 as a seaman and radio operator. He then struggled to support himself as an author for several years, publishing his first novel, Out Went the Candle, in 1955, followed by On the Line in 1957. The latter novel was one of the first literary expressions of US worker discontent during the 1950s. An essay published by Esquire in 1959, "Why Resign from the Human Race?", contributed to the foundation of the Peace Corps. He was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 1960.

He also taught at Sarah Lawrence and the University of Massachusetts and reported on the Biafran War.

Swados died in 1972 of a brain hemorrhage.

Novels

• Out Went the Candle (New York: Viking, 1955)
• False Coin (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1959)
• The Will (Cleveland: World, 1963)
• Standing Fast (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970)
• Celebration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975)
• The Unknown Constellations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)

Short story collections

• On the Line (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1957)
• Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1960)
• A Story for Teddy and Others (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965)
• Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of Harvey Swados. Introduction by Robin Swados. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986)

Essays

• A Radical’s America (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1962)
• A Radical at Large: American Essays (London: Hart-Davis, 1968).

Edited works

• Years of Conscience: The Muckrakers (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962)
• The American Writer and the Great Depression (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)

Children’s literature/Translations

• Agouhanna, by Claude Aubry. Translated from the French by Harvey Swados. Illustrated by Grey Cohoe. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971)
• Bim, The Little Donkey, by Albert Lamorisse. Translated from the French by Harvey and Bette Swados (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)
• The Mystery of the Spanish Silver Mine (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)

Biography

• Standing Up for the People: The Life and Work of Estes Kefauver (New York: Dutton, 1972)