Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Eggers is also the founder of "Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern", a literary journal, a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines. Early life and education. Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father, John K.  Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, while his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. His father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago, where he attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers's elder brother, William D. Eggers, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research promoting privatization. Eggers's sister, Beth, died by suicide in November 2001. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan  interview for McSweeney's. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, intending to get a degree in journalism. However, his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents: his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer. These events were chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". At the time, Eggers was age 21, and his youngest sibling, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two elder siblings, William and Beth, were unable to commit to care for Toph; his  oldest sibling, William, had a full-time job and his next-oldest sibling, Beth, was enrolled in law school. As a result, Dave Eggers took the responsibility. He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers' sibling, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his  friend David Moodie, he took over a local free newspaper called "Cups". This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine "Might". Literary work. 1990s. 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 humour pieces, and a number of essays and non-fiction pieces by seminal writers of the 1990s, including "Impediments to Passion", an essay on sex in the AIDS era by David Foster Wallace. As Eggers later recounted in his memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", the magazine consistently struggled to make a profit, and finally ceased 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" magazine and continuing to work for "Salon". 2000s. Eggers's first book was a memoir with fictional elements, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (2000), which focused 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 Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality , idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for 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 first fully fictional 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 a  collection of short stories, "How We Are Hungry", and three politically themed serials for "Salon.com". 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 major human rights abuses and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. Eggers's 2006 novel "" 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. 2010s. In the early 2010s , after going 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 wider world in the twenty-first century. Eggers published his novel of the Great Recession and late 2000s 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", released in October 2013, and depicting the life of  a young worker at a fictional San Francisco-based technology company in the near future, as she faces doubts about her vocation, due to the company's seemingly well-intentioned innovations revealing a more sinister underlying agenda. Completing the productive spell, a new novel concerning anxiety with America's place in the world, "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?", was published in June 2014. In November 2015, "Your Fathers, Where Are They ..." was longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award, Eggers' fifth nomination for the award following earlier nominations for "The Circle", "A  Hologram for the King", "The Wild Things", and "What is the What". In July 2016, Eggers published his sixth novel, "Heroes of the Frontier". Earlier the same year, a film adaptation of Eggers' earlier novel "A Hologram for the King" was released, to mixed reviews and middling commercial performance. "The Circle", a film version of Eggers' book, starring Emma Watson, John Boyega, and Tom Hanks (who had starred in the "Hologram for the King" adaptation), was released in April 2017. Eggers followed "Heroes of the Frontier" with "The Monk of Mokha" (2018), another nonfiction biography in a similar vein to  Zeitoun, billed by the publishers as "the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war." Eggers ended the decade by publishing two very stylistically different novellas, written concurrently with each other. "The Parade", published by Knopf in March 2019, was a spare, minimalist novella reflecting Eggers' long-standing concerns with humanitarian issues, global development, and Western perceptions of the developing world. According to the advance blurb from the publisher, the novel concerns "two men, Western contractors  sent to work far from home, tasked with paving a road to the capital in a dangerous and largely lawless country." Reviews were mixed: positive notices included Andrew Motion writing in "The Guardian" that "[Eggers'] novel may be sternly reduced in terms of its cast and language, but this leanness doesn't diminish the strength of its argument", while Ron Charles in "The Washington Post" demurred that "The Parade" "[is] a story that conforms to the West's reductive attitudes about the developing world. Writers and politicians have long generalized about those individual cultures. A novel that lumps them together  into a nameless, primitive nation only plays into that tendency." "The Parade" was followed in November 2019 by another short novella, "The Captain and the Glory", billed by Eggers himself as a "allegorical satire" of the Trump administration. In an interview with the publishers Knopf published on the McSweeney's website, Eggers described the novel as "an attempt to understand this era by painting it in the gaudy and garish colors it really deserves... This is part farce, part parable, and I do hope, though the Captain bears more than a passing resemblance to Trump, that the book will be  readable when Trump is gone. That's part of the reason I called it 'An entertainment' on the title page. It's a nod to Graham Greene but also the way I hope people will read it. It was cathartic to write and I hope cathartic to read." As with "The Parade", reviews were decidedly mixed, with much criticism noting that Eggers' satire struggled to keep up with or do justice to the events of the Trump era. In a review for the "Financial Times", Carl Wilkinson expressed bemusement about the purpose of the book and its intentions, Hannah Barekat  in "The Spectator" was critical for the "heavy handed" nature of the book's satire, while "The Guardian", "The Times Literary Supplement", and "Kirkus Reviews" also found the book wanting. 2020s. Eggers returned to the literary fold in 2021 with two new works of literary fiction. A short novella "The Museum of Rain", is due for publication in June 2021, and according to the McSweeney's website, the "elegiac" short story concerns "an American Army vet in his 70s who is asked to lead a group of young grand-nieces and grand-nephews on a walk through the hills of  California's Central Coast. Walking toward a setting sun, their destination is a place called The Museum of Rain, which may or may not still exist, and whose origin and meaning are elusive to all." Eggers' next novel, "The Every", was released in October. The novel is a follow-up to his 2013 novel "The Circle". McSweeney's. Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, named for his mother's maiden name. The publishing house produces a quarterly literary journal, "Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern", first published in 1998; a monthly journal, "The Believer", which debuted in 2003 and  is edited by Eggers's wife, Vendela Vida; and, from 2005 to 2012, a quarterly DVD magazine, "Wholphin". Other works include "The Future Dictionary of America", "Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans", and "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey", all children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother and uses as a pseudonym. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the U.S. national team and soccer in the United States for "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup", which contained essays about each competing team in the tournament  and was published with aid from the journal "Granta". According to "The San Francisco Chronicle", Eggers was rumored to be a possible candidate to be the new editor of "The Paris Review" before the Review selected Lorin Stein. Visual art work. While at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Eggers attended art classes. After the publication of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", he focused mainly on writing, but publicly returned to visual art with a solo gallery show at Electric Works, San Francisco, in 2010, called "It Is Right to Draw Their Fur". The show featured many drawings of  animals often paired with phrases, sometimes out of the Bible. In conjunction with that exhibition, McSweeney's published a catalog featuring 25 loose-leaf prints of the work featured in the show. In 2015 Eggers had his first solo museum exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art called "The Insufferable Throne of God". Eggers is represented by Electric Works a fine art gallery in San Francisco. Outside of exhibitions, Eggers' visual art contributions include the following: 826 National. In 2002, Eggers and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18  in San Francisco. It has since grown into six chapters across the United States: Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Washington, D.C., and Boston, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fund-raising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart, Davy Rothbart, and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation awarded  Eggers a $250,000 Heinz Award (given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals") in the Arts and Humanities. In accordance with Eggers's wishes, the award money was given to 826 National and The Teacher Salary Project. In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable. Personal life. Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is married to Vendela Vida, also a writer. The couple have two children. Vida and Eggers had met in 1998 in San Francisco at a wedding and  started dating in 1999. He was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish was for helping community members to personally engage with local public schools. The same year, he was named one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World" by "Utne Reader". Bibliography. Short stories. Collections: Uncollected short stories: Children's books. "The Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance" series (as "Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey", with Christopher Eggers, picture books): Stand-alones: