28 Facts About Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Dave Eggers's writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.

Dave Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in a family with three siblings.

Dave Eggers's father, John K Eggers, was an attorney, and his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers, was a schoolteacher.

The family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, where Dave Eggers attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn.

At age 21, Dave Eggers took responsibility for his younger brother, Christopher, and moved to Berkeley, California.

Dave Eggers's elder brother, William D Eggers, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, promoting privatization.

Dave Eggers later recounted in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that the magazine struggled to profit and stopped publication in 1997.

In 2002, Dave Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe.

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

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.

Dave 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.

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

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

Dave Eggers followed this with The Circle, released in October 2013, and depicts the life of a young worker at a fictional San Francisco-based technology company shortly, as she faces doubts about her vocation due to the company's seemingly well-intentioned innovations revealing a more sinister underlying agenda.

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

Dave Eggers ended the decade by publishing two stylistically different novellas written concurrently.

Dave 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Dave Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Vendela Vida, who is a writer.

Dave Eggers was the primary guardian of his youngest brother, Toph, with whom he co-authored children's books.

Dave Eggers has won numerous annual awards for specific works as well as lifetime achievement awards.

Voice of Witness, founded by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen, is a non-profit organization that uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the US and around the world through an oral history book series and an education program.