Background and career
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. In April 2016, Eggers visited Israel as part of a project by Breaking the Silence to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation and the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War. The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and published under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation in June 2017. In July 2016, Eggers published Heroes of the Frontier. Earlier the same year, a film adaptation of Eggers's earlier novel A Hologram for the King was released to mixed reviews and middling commercial performance. The Circle, a film version of Eggers's 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 stylistically different novellas written concurrently. The Parade, published by Knopf in March 2019, was a spare, minimalist novella reflecting Eggers's 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's 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", and Ron Charles in The Washington Post wrote 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 an "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's 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 of the "heavy handed" nature of the book's satire, and The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and Kirkus Reviews also found the book wanting. In 2021, his novella The Museum of Rain was published, 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 The Museum of Rain, which may or may not still exist, and whose origin and meaning are elusive to all." The Museum of Rain was the first in a series of novellas that Eggers has published since 2021 under the banner 'The Forgetters', billed as a "grand experiment in serialized publishing" that "will someday be a probably-overlong novel" Entries in the 'Forgetters' series published since 2021 to-date are The Honor of Your Presence (November 2023); Keeper of the Ornaments, The Comebacker and Where The Candles are Kept (October 2024); Sanrevelle (August 2025); The Ocean is Everyone's But Not Yours (October 2025); and Uncle Patrick's Secessionist Breakfast (December 2025). The novel The Every was released in October 2021 as a follow-up to his 2013 novel The Circle. Contrapposto, a novel about art and a 60-year friendship, was published in June 2026. New York Times reviewer Alexandra Jacobs called it "a romance of epic and goopy proportions" that also explores "the meaning of art and the unfairness, pretensions and occasional skulduggery of the art world."
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house known for its literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, which he began in 1998. McSweeney's also publishes The Believer, a monthly journal edited by Eggers's wife, Vendela Vida, and the now-defunct DVD magazine Wholphin. In addition to his literary pursuits, Eggers is a philanthropist. In 2002, he and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for children and young adults. The project has since expanded into a national organization, 826 National, with chapters in cities across the United States (Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Washington, Boston, New Orleans and Minneapolis–Saint Paul). 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. In 2006, he appeared at fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. 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.
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. Still, he publicly returned to visual art in 2010, with a solo gallery show at Electric Works in San Francisco, 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:
Provided album art for Austin rock group Paul Banks & the Carousels' album Yelling at the Sun. Designed the artwork for Thrice's album Vheissu.
