Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers (born 1970 in Boston) is an American writer, editor and publisher, and one of the most recognizable voices in American postmodern literature of the early twenty-first century. His output includes novels, memoirs, short stories, children's books and reportage, and it is marked by a blend of autobiographical material with a sustained interest in social and political questions.

He grew up in Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago, where he was a classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn. He studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. After the deaths of both his parents within weeks of each other, he became the guardian of his younger brother and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, an experience that gave rise to his first book.

Before he published books, he worked as an editor for Salon.com and founded Might magazine in San Francisco, which ran until 1997. His best-known work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), mixes memory with invented material. It became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He went on to write novels such as What Is the What (2006), based on the life of a Sudanese refugee and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Circle (2013), a satire of a powerful technology company. He has also turned to reportage, as in Zeitoun (2009), which follows a Muslim-American family.

His legacy lies largely in his editorial and educational ventures. He edits the annual anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading and has founded projects in literacy and human rights, including the 826 Valencia writing centre and the Voice of Witness organisation. His combination of humour, formal experiment and social commitment has made him a reference point for much contemporary American fiction.