Dave Eggers
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Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American writer and editor.
Life
Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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 [link], 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 [link]. 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 began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine. His first book was a memoir (with fictional 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, a story about a frustrating world-wide attempt to give away money to deserving people. 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, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com.
Eggers is also the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's; a monthly journal, The Believer; and a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books, which Eggers writes with his younger brother.
Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children which he cofounded in 2002.
Bibliography
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
- You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002)
- Sacrament (revised and expanded version of You Shall Know Our Velocity--this is the version that was published in the 2003 Vintage paperback under the original title) (2003)
- Jokes Told in Heaven about Babies (as Lucy Thomas) (2003)
- The Unforbidden is Compulsory or, Optimism (2004)
- (2004)
- Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (co-authored with Daniel Moulthrop and NÃnive Clements Calegari) (2005)
- What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (forthcoming, October 2006)
External links
- [Author page on the McSweeney's website] (features a detailed bibliography)
- [Interview on The Onion AV Club]
- [Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency]
- ["People Should Not Laugh at Savings"] A short essay written by Eggers under the pseudonym Lucy Thomas and included in the collection Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies.
- [Eggers' Salon.com serials]
- [Killing Your Parents for Fame and Profit: The Dave Eggers Story]
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