Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. As an author, he has written fiction, non-fiction, and children's books. His 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Eggers is also the founder of several literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights non-profit organisation Voice of Witness.
Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition.
His writing has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in a family with three siblings. His father, John K. Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, and his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a schoolteacher. The family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, where Eggers attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn.
Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, pursuing a degree in journalism. At age 21, following the deaths of both his parents from cancer, only 32 days apart, Eggers became the guardian of his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where their elder sister Beth was attending law school. Eggers' fictionalized memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was based on these events. His elder brother, William D. Eggers, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, promoting privatization. Beth Eggers died by suicide in November 2001.
Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine in San Francisco in 1994 with David Moodie and Marny Requa, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell) for SF Weekly.
Might evolved out of the small San Francisco-based independent paper Cups, and gathered a loyal following with its irreverent humor and quirky approach to the issues and personalities of the day. An article purporting to be an obituary of former 1980s child star Adam Rich (originally intended to be Back to the Future star Crispin Glover until Glover backed out) garnered some national attention. The magazine regularly included humor pieces, and several essays and nonfiction pieces by seminal writers of the 1990s, including "Impediments to Passion", an essay on sex in the AIDS era by David Foster Wallace.
Eggers later recounted in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that the magazine struggled to profit and stopped publication in 1997. An anthology of the best of Might magazine's brief run, 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp' and Other Essays from Might Magazine, was published in late 1998. By this time, Eggers was freelancing for Esquire and continuing to work for Salon.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published in 2000, is Eggers's first book, a memoir with fictional elements, and it focuses on his struggle to raise his younger brother in the San Francisco Bay Area following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy postscript entitled, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making.
In 2002, Eggers published his second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003. A version without the new material in Sacrament was created and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for a Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories, and three politically themed serials for Salon.
In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, a specialist in the aftermath of prominent human rights abuses and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.
Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
Eggers was one of the original contributors to ESPN The Magazine and helped create its section "The Jump". He also acted as the first anonymous "Answer Guy", a column that continued to run after he stopped working for the publication.
On November 7, 2009, he was presented with the "Courage in Media" Award by the Council on American–Islamic Relations for his book Zeitoun. Zeitoun was optioned by Jonathan Demme, who considered an animated film-rendition of the work. To Demme, it "felt like the first in-depth immersion I'd ever had through literature or film into the Muslim-American family. ... The moral was that they are like people of any other faith, and I hope our film, if we can get it made, will also be like that." Demme, quoted in early 2011, expressed confidence that when the script was finished, he would be able to find financing, perhaps even from a major studio. However, in May 2014, The Playlist reported that the film was "percolat[ing] in development". Demme died in April 2017, and the project has not been heard of since.
In the early 2010s, after six years without publishing substantive literary fiction following What is the What, Eggers began a three-year streak of back-to-back novels, each broadly concerned with pressing social and political issues facing the United States and the world in the twenty-first century. Eggers published his novel of the Great Recession and the 2008 financial crisis, A Hologram for the King, in July 2012. In October of that year, the novel was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award.
Eggers followed this with The Circle, which was released in October 2013. The novel tells the story of a young employee at a fictional technology company based in San Francisco. As she navigates her job, she begins to doubt her career when despite the company's seemingly benevolent innovations, a more sinister underlying agenda is ultimately revealed. Critics said the fictional company seemed to be a blend of Facebook, Google and other social media outlets.
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? was published in June 2014. In November 2015, the book was longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award, Eggers's fifth nomination for the award following earlier nominations for The Circle, A Hologram for the King, The Wild Things, and What is the What.