Eggers, Dave

Dave Eggers, (born March 12, 1970, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.), American author, publisher, and literacy advocate whose breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), was followed by other fiction and nonfiction successes. He also founded the publishing house McSweeney’s in 1998.

Eggers grew up in Boston and in Illinois, and for a time he 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, where Eggers cofounded 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. It earned him instant acclaim and literary stardom as well as a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

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.

A number of fiction books followed Eggers’s memoir, notably What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006). The book chronicled the story of a South Sudanese man who had survived the destruction of his family’s village during Sudan’s civil war and made his way to the United States. 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.

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 cowritten with director Spike Jonze. The movie and book are loose adaptations of Sendak’s original, inspired as much by its wistful beauty and loving approach to the child mind as by its story. That year Eggers also saw the film Away We Go, which he cowrote 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). In 2021 Eggers published a sequel, The Every.

Among Egger’s 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. In 2019 Eggers published The Parade, about two men tasked with paving a road in an unnamed country after a civil war, and The Captain and the Glory, a farce about the United States. Visitants (2013) is a collection of travel writing.