Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is an American author and publisher whose A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius established him as a defining voice of his literary generation, and whose subsequent novels have engaged technology, migration, and memory with consistent ambition.

Dave Eggers published A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in 2000, a memoir about raising his younger brother after the death of both parents from cancer within five weeks of each other, while simultaneously attempting to become a writer in San Francisco. The book’s meta-fictional apparatus — lengthy prefaces, footnotes, interviews with itself — was either brilliant or exhausting depending on the reader, but its emotional core was genuine, and it became one of the defining literary memoirs of its decade.

Eggers founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house and literary journal that became a center of the alternative literary culture of the 2000s, and 826 Valencia, a writing center for underserved students that has since expanded nationally. His editorial and institutional work has arguably been as influential as his writing. What Is the What (2006), the fictionalized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee, is his most sustained and serious work: a book that uses the novel form to deliver testimony that journalism would struggle to make as vivid.

The Circle (2013), a satirical novel about a Google-like technology company and the surveillance culture it enables, was his most commercially successful fiction — it anticipated several of the debates about technology and privacy that became mainstream in subsequent years. Zeitoun (2009), the account of a Syrian-American man’s experience during Hurricane Katrina, is his most purely journalistic work. Eggers has consistently demonstrated that literary ambition and social commitment need not be in opposition.