Dave Eggers

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Dave Eggers at the 2005 Hay Festival
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Dave Eggers at the 2005 Hay Festival

Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher.

Contents

[edit] Life

Eggers was born in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in suburban Lake Forest, 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, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, 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.

[edit] Work

Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly. 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 originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making".

In 2002, 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. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, " a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician" [3]. Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Egger's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, was released in October 2006. Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.

Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, 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. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, 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, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.

Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children which he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles (826LA}, New York City (826NYC), Seattle (826 Seattle), Chicago (826 Chicago), and Ann Arbor, Michigan (826 Michigan). In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Nonfiction

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Children's books

  • Giraffes? Giraffes! (as Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey, co-authored with Christopher Eggers) (2003)
  • Your Disgusting Head (as Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey, co-authored with Christopher Eggers) (2004)
  • Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid (as Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey, co-authored with Christopher Eggers) (2006)

[edit] Other

[edit] As editor or contributor (non-McSweeney's publications)

[edit] Misc

  • Eggers went to grade school and highschool with Vince Vaughn.[5]
  • Eggers reportedly turned down a $2 million movie deal from New Line and Miramax [6]
  • From the 2006 movie John Tucker Must Die: "She likes old-school Elvis Costello, listens to obscure podcasts and she reads Dave Eggers. She's deep."[7]

[edit] External links

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