Dave Eggers
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Dave Eggers (born January 8, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American writer and editor.
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Life
Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He began his career as a Salon.com editor, and founded Might magazine. He lives in San Francisco. He is married to Vendela Vida, a graduate of the Columbia University MFA program and the author of two books - Girls on the Verge and And Now You Can Go. In October 2005, the couple welcomed a daughter named October Adelaide Eggers Vida.
Eggers's brother, Bill, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks [1], doing research on Eastern Europe. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her [2]. She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, calling them "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment." On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide.
Career
Eggers's first book was a memoir (with fictionalized elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of his 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 original, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several original stylistic elements. Some editions were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making". In 2002 he published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and then retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since also published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, a quarterly literary journal, and an independent publisher of the same name. Other McSweeney's collections, including The Future Dictionary of America and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books.
Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002.
Bibliography
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, (2000)
- You Shall Know Our Velocity, (2002)
- How We Are Hungry, (2004)
- Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, (2005) (co-authored with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari)
External links
- Author page on the McSweeney's website (features a detailed bibliography)
- Interview on The Onion AV Club
- Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendencyno:Dave Eggers