Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 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, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
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 caring 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, Eggers took 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, Eggers 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.