Background

Dave Eggers was born on March 12, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, to John K. Eggers, an attorney, and Heidi McSweeney Eggers, a school teacher.

Education

Eggers studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When he was 21 years old, however, the death of both of his parents within a very brief period led him to drop his studies in order to help raise his 8-year-old brother, Christopher (Toph). The two moved to California.

Career

In California, Eggers co-founded the short-lived satiric Might magazine. Eggers was an editor at Salon.com and a writer for a number of publications, including Esquire magazine, before releasing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

The memoir, which was enriched with postmodern writing techniques and fictionalized encounters, detailed Eggers’s experiences raising Toph. A number of fiction books followed Eggers’s memoir, notably What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006). In 2009 the film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was released concurrently with Eggers’s novelization of the screenplay, which he had co-written with director Spike Jonze. That year Eggers also saw the film Away We Go, which he co-wrote with his wife, Vendela Vida, appear on the big screen.

Eggers’s other books included Zeitoun (2009), a nonfiction account of a Syrian American man and his experiences in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the novel A Hologram for the King (2012; film 2016), which reflected anxieties about globalization with its tale of a middle-aged American pursuing business in Saudi Arabia. Eggers examined the pernicious effects of digital and social media in the novel The Circle (2013), which chronicles the travails of a young initiate at a deceptively utopian technology conglomerate; he later cowrote the script for the film adaptation (2017). Among his other fictional works were Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014), a series of dialogues between a disturbed man and the people he kidnaps in an effort to diagnose contemporary societal ills; Heroes of the Frontier (2016), which chronicles a recently divorced dentist’s efforts to heal from the effects of a series of misfortunes by taking her children on a road trip to Alaska; and The Monk of Mokha (2018), about an aspiring coffee entrepreneur in San Francisco who returns to his ancestral homeland of Yemen, where he must overcome numerous obstacles - including civil war - to start a business. Visitants (2013) is a collection of travel writing.

In an effort to create a platform for other young writers, Eggers founded McSweeney’s publishing house, which started with the 1998 launch of the literary magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. In 2003 it was joined by The Believer, a journal of literary reviews and interviews and other, often esoteric, pop-culture musings. McSweeney’s also served as a book imprint and in 2005 originated the DVD "magazine" Wholphin, featuring new or underexposed short films.

The creation in 2002 of Eggers’s nonprofit organization 826 Valencia, based in San Francisco, was a further foray into literary advocacy. It was a volunteer-based writing laboratory devoted to developing kids’ creativity and love of books through programs that included free tutoring and writing workshops. Soon after, branches of 826 Valencia opened in other major cities, including Chicago, Seattle, and New York, and the organization became known as 826 National. Each branch was located behind a store that both generated revenue and served as a cheeky "front" for the education happening behind closed doors; i.e., 826 Valencia served also as a pirate supply store, and the front of 826 Chicago was a spy supply store masquerading as the Boring Store.

In 2018, Eggers co-founded The International Congress of Youth Voices, an annual gathering of 100 extraordinary young writers and activists; their landmark meeting in San Francisco resulted in a youth-written manifesto published by The Guardian.

Dave is also a founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a humor website, and a journal of new writing, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world.

Achievements

• Dave Eggers is known as a prolific author, publisher, and literacy advocate whose breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), was followed by other fiction and nonfiction successes. The book was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.
  
  In 2007 the Heinz Family Foundation made Eggers the youngest-ever recipient of its arts and humanities award, noting his contributions not only to literature but also to the writing community.
  
  Eggers is also the winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
  
  Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States. Numerous other organizations worldwide operate with inspiration from the 826 National model.
  
  Trained as a painter, Eggers’s artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Biennial of the Americas, and numerous other galleries and art spaces.

Works

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  • What Is the What

    (What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of V...)

    2006
  • The Story of Captain Nemo

    (In this science-fiction classic - reimagined by Dave Egge...)

    2013
  • Her Right Foot

    (In this fascinating, fun take on nonfiction, uniquely Ame...)

    2017
  • A Hologram for the King

    (In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession...)

    2016
  • The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment

    (A savage satire of the United States in the throes of ins...)

    2019
  • The Monk of Mokha

    (The Monk of Mokha is the exhilarating true story of a you...)

    2018
  • Heroes of the Frontier

    (A captivating, often hilarious novel of family and wilder...)

    2016
  • A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story

    (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving m...)

    2000
  • How We Are Hungry

    (Dave Eggers—Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Heartbreaking W...)

    2004
  • You Shall Know Our Velocity

    (In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and ...)

    2002
  • Ungrateful Mammals

    (Eggers is one of the most notable writers of his generati...)

    2017
  • The Wild Things

    (Max is a rambunctious eight-year-old whose world is chang...)

    2009
  • This Bridge Will Not Be Gray

    (This Bridge Will Not Be Gray is a joyful history lesson -...)

    2015
  • The Circle

    (When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the wor...)

    2013
  • The Parade

    (From the bestselling author of The Monk of Mokha and The ...)

    2019
  • The Lifters

    (In The Lifters, critically acclaimed author Dave Eggers e...)

    2018
  • Zeitoun

    (The true story of one family, caught between America’s tw...)

  • The Voice of Witness Reader: Ten Years of Amplifying Unheard Voices

    (For ten years, Voice of Witness has illuminated contempor...)

    2015
  • Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

    (From Dave Eggers, best-selling author of The Circle, a ti...)

    2014
  • What Can a Citizen Do?

    (This is a book about what citizenship - good citizenship ...)

    2018
  • Short Short Stories 2005

Religion

Dave's father was a Protestant and his mother was a Catholic.

Connections

Dave Eggers is married to Vandela Vida. They have two children - October Adelaide Eggers Vida and Bornin Boston.

Father:

John K. Eggers

Mother:

Heidi McSweeney Eggers

child:

Bornin Boston Eggers

child:

October Adelaide Eggers Vida Eggers

Wife:

Vandela Vida

Born on September 6, 1971

Vendela Vida is an American novelist, journalist, editor and educator. She is the author of multiple books, a writing teacher, and an editor of The Believer magazine.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors.
  2010