33 Facts About Dave Eggers

1.

Dave Eggers wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

2.

Dave Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings.

3.

Dave Eggers's father, John K Eggers, was an attorney, while his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers, was a school teacher.

4.

Dave Eggers's father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic.

5.

When Dave 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.

6.

Dave Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.

7.

At the time, Dave Eggers was age 21, and his youngest sibling, Christopher, was 8 years old.

8.

Dave Eggers left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother.

9.

Toph attended a small private school, and Dave Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper.

10.

Dave Eggers's first book was a memoir with fictional elements, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which focused on his struggle to raise his younger brother in the San Francisco Bay Area following the deaths of both of their parents.

11.

In 2002, Dave 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.

12.

Dave Eggers has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically themed serials for Salon.

13.

In November 2005, Dave Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated.

14.

Dave Eggers's 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.

15.

Dave Eggers was one of the original contributors to ESPN The Magazine and helped create its section "The Jump".

16.

Dave Eggers acted as the first, anonymous "Answer Guy", a column that continued to run after he stopped working for the publication.

17.

Dave Eggers published his novel of the Great Recession and late 2000s financial crisis, A Hologram for the King, in July 2012.

18.

Dave 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.

19.

In July 2016, Dave Eggers published his sixth novel, Heroes of the Frontier.

20.

The Circle, a film version of Dave Eggers' book, starring Emma Watson, John Boyega, and Tom Hanks, was released in April 2017.

21.

Dave Eggers ended the decade by publishing two very stylistically different novellas, written concurrently with each other.

22.

Dave Eggers returned to the literary fold in 2021 with two new works of literary fiction.

23.

Dave Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, named for his mother's maiden name.

24.

Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Dave Eggers wrote an essay about the US 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.

25.

In 2015 Dave Eggers had his first solo museum exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art called "The Insufferable Throne of God".

26.

Dave Eggers is represented by Electric Works, a fine art gallery in San Francisco.

27.

Dave Eggers went to South Dakota to speak to authorities and students and offered any students who wanted one of the banned books copies for free via his website.

28.

In December 2022, Dave Eggers travelled on behalf of PEN America to Kyiv, Ukraine.

29.

Dave Eggers published "The Profound Defiance of Daily Life In Kyiv" in The New Yorker based on his time in the war-torn country.

30.

Dave Eggers was the primary guardian of his youngest brother Toph Dave Eggers and later co-authored children's books together.

31.

Vida and Dave Eggers had met in 1998 in San Francisco at a wedding and started dating in 1999.

32.

Dave Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients.

33.

Dave Eggers's TED Prize wish was for helping community members to personally engage with local public schools.