Dave Eggers

Fiction and Nonfiction Writer

• Born: 1970
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Biography

David Eggers became a household name after the enormous success of his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). He parlayed his popularity (and royalties) into starting a literary press that produced a quarterly magazine (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern) and hardback literary books, often of the experimental variety. He found further success with his subsequent novels and nonfiction works and branched into screenwriting and other ventures, including social activism.

The third of four children, Eggers was born in 1970 in Boston and raised by his parents in the prestigious Lake Forest suburb of Chicago. Eggers’s father was an attorney, and his mother a teacher. While attending college at the University of Illinois in 1991, twenty-one-year-old Eggers learned that his mother was dying of stomach cancer. After returning home for winter break, he stayed to help care for her. As detailed in Eggers’s memoir, the decline of his mother was slow and painful, and the tension caused by her suffering affected the entire family. While steeling themselves for their mother’s death, however, the Eggers siblings were shocked by the sudden death of their father in November 1991 from lung cancer. Less than two months later, Eggers’s mother had also passed away, and the siblings—twenty-four-year-old Bill, twenty-three-year-old Beth, and Eggers—were faced with the question of raising their brother Toph (short for Christopher), who was about to turn eight years old.

Before long, it was decided that Beth would return to Berkeley, California, to attend law school, and that Eggers and Toph would live in San Francisco. Bill would soon move to California as well. Not surprisingly, Eggers, a young man of college age, had difficulty adjusting to a life centered on raising an eight-year-old. In addition to the new responsibilities this brought, he used a sizable portion of his inheritance to help found Might magazine in 1994 with his Lake Forest friends David Moodie and Marny Requa, who had also moved to San Francisco. Might published only sixteen issues and never exceeded a circulation of thirty thousand, but it garnered a cult following and a reputation for wit, savvy media satire, and irreverence. Might gained national notoriety when it printed a eulogy for former child television star Adam Rich (who played the youngest son on Eight Is Enough) despite Rich having not actually died.

By 1997, however, the magazine had folded, and Eggers finally made progress on his memoir, the ironically titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The book tells the story of his life with Toph, the rise and fall of Might, Eggers’s attempts to land a spot on MTV network’s reality show The Real World, and Eggers’s struggles to recover from the death of his parents. More importantly, Eggers showed his allegiance to postmodern culture, as defined by writers like David Foster Wallace, by framing the memoir in innovative and humorous ways. The copyright page of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius contains a long and satirical digression on whether the work is nonfiction or fiction, a scale rating the author’s sexuality, and an accounting of the true power of Simon and Schuster, the publishers. The acknowledgments section is more than twenty pages long. Throughout the book, Eggers repeatedly steps back from the story being told in the memoir to analyze both the events being related and his methods, motives, and techniques in relating them.

As a result of his work with Might and appearances in other counterculture media like the website Salon.com, Eggers secured his book with Simon and Schuster for the reported advance of $100,000 (particularly large for a first-time author). The poignancy of the story, combined with Eggers’s satirical and self-conscious shirking of convention, won excellent reviews from publications including the New York Times Book Review, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Time. Both the hardback and paperback editions of the book were listed on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the paperback eventually climbed to first place on the nonfiction list. Furthermore, the New York Times listed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as one of the best books of 2000, and it was chosen as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

Eggers capitalized on the success of his memoir by launching the literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (also known as McSweeney’s) before A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had even seen publication. McSweeney’s was published as a hardbound quarterly journal largely given to printing postmodern and experimental literature; almost immediately, writers with countercultural cachet, such as Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders, began publishing in McSweeney’s. Eggers also launched a website, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (www.McSweeneys.net), that published even more experimental material. By 2003, he had expanded the enterprise to include a monthly magazine of literary reviews, The Believer, which his wife would eventually edit. Eggers also became a noted advocate for literacy and writing, forming several nonprofits and workshops to support aspiring authors and editing the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology series.

Eggers’s rapid rise to popularity resulted in the inevitable backlash; websites dedicated to jokes or less-than-flattering stories about him proliferated. Perhaps surprised by his quick ascension to fame, Eggers zealously guarded his remaining privacy, at one point only giving interviews via email and publicly trading insults with reporters. However, his status continued to grow, aided in part by his actions at readings and benefits. At one reading, Eggers collected a group of listeners onto a bus and conveyed them to a pool hall for the evening. At a cancer benefit in Denver, Eggers shocked the audience by making a pledge of $100,000 to the Webb-Waring Institute for Cancer, Aging, and Antioxidant Research. He sold the film rights for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to New Line Pictures in 2001 for a reported two million dollars, and he used the money to further his publishing interests.

Continuing to write, Eggers produced works of both fiction and nonfiction over the subsequent years that would earn him critical acclaim and several honors. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) provides a fictionalized account of the life of a Sudanese man following the decimation of his family's village during the Sudanese Civil War. Zeitoun (2009), a true story of a New Orleans man's ordeals in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, earned an American Book Award. A Hologram for the King (2012), a novel depicting a man's struggle to support his family during global economic hardship, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2012. The Circle (2013) is a fictional tale about a woman working for a dystopian technology company that demands transparency and threatens privacy. It was adapted as a film starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson that appeared in 2017.

Eggers's later novels included the political Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014); the family-relationships-focused Heroes of the Frontier (2016); the minimalist, experimental The Parade (2019); and the satire The Captain and the Glory (2019). He also released The Monk of Mokha (2018), a nonfiction account of one man's attempt to rekindle the coffee industry in Yemen. A sequel to The Circle, The Every, was published in 2021. That same year, Eggers released the short story "The Museum of Rain," which became the first installment of an ongoing project called The Forgetters. Eggers published additional stories in the series in 2023 and 2024.

Though best known for his novels and literary nonfiction, Eggers also published works for other audiences. He released a series of humor books with his younger brother, beginning with Giraffes? Giraffes! in 2003. Eggers' first children's book, the self-illustrated When Marlana Pulled a Thread, appeared in 2011. It was followed by the better-received The Bridge Will Not Be Gray (2015), which began a string of collaborations with various illustrators. These included Her Right Foot (2017), The Lifters (2018), What Can a Citizen Do? (2018), Tomorrow Most Likely (2019), and Faraway Things (2021). The Eyes and the Impossible (2023) was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal. Eggers also published Moving the Millers' Minnie Moore Mine Mansion (2023) and Soren's Seventh Song (2024).

Beyond books, Eggers also helped to write screenplays, such as Away We Go (2009) and Where the Wild Things Are (2009). He contributed the story for the 2012 film Promised Land, starring Matt Damon, and worked on the screenplays for film adaptations of his books A Hologram for the King and The Circle.

Bibliography

Blevins, Jason. “Author’s Pledge Staggers Crowd.” Denverpost.com. Denver Post, 14 Sept. 2000, extras.denverpost.com/news/news0914k.htm. Accessed 20 July 2024.

“Dave Eggers.” Dave Eggers, daveeggers.net/dave-eggers. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Eggers, Dave. "Q&A: A Conversation with Dave Eggers." Alta, 21 Dec. 2023, www.altaonline.com/california-book-club/a45965158/qanda-dave-eggers-the-every. Accessed 21 June 2024.

Flanagan, Mark. "Biography of Writer and Activist Dave Eggers." ThoughtCo., 5 June 2019, www.thoughtco.com/profile-of-dave-eggers-851475. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Kakutani, Michiko. “A Heartbreaking Work . . .: Clever Young Man Raises Sweet Little Brother.” New York Times, 1 Feb. 2000, p. E-8.

Merritt, Stephanie. “The Agony and the Irony.” The Guardian, 14 May 2000, www.theguardian.com/books/2000/may/14/biography.features. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Mosle, Sara. “My Brother’s Keeper.” New York Times, 20 Feb. 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/02/20/books/my-brother-s-keeper.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.