Dave Eggers

He is married to Vendela Vida, with whom he has two children.

His brother Bill works for several conservative think tanks and promotes privatization through his research. Beth, his sister committed suicide in November 2001.

With his younger brother Toph, he writes children’s books of literary nonsense, such as ‘The Future Dictionary of America’, ‘Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans’, and ‘Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey’.

Dave Eggers was born to John K. Eggers, an attorney, and Heidi McSweeney Eggers, a school teacher. His siblings were Bill, Beth, and Christopher (Toph).

He attended high school in Lake Forest, near Chicago and he also obtained his degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, he put his education on hold due to the death of his parents from 1991-1992.

He moved to Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Kirsten and his younger brother Toph, as his two elder siblings were unable to care for him.

He started his career as a ‘temp’ and dabbled in freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. He then worked with his friend David Moodie and took over ‘Cups’, a local newspaper, which gradually evolved into the satirical magazine ‘Might’.

During this time, he also started a comic strip called ‘Smarter Feller’ for ‘SF Weekly’.

In 1998, the first edition of ‘Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern’ journal was published by Mc Sweeney’s, a publishing house established in his mother’s name.

In 2000, his Pulitzer-prize-shortlisted memoir, ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ was published. After two years, he authored his first novel ‘You Shall Know Our Velocity’ and co-founded ‘826 Valencia’, a charitable tutoring and writing center for children.

In 2003, McSweeney worked on ‘The Believer’, a monthly journal that is regularly edited by Eggers's wife, Vendela Vida.

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, which was published in 2000. It is considered one of his major works because it was nominated for ‘2000 Best Book of the Year’ by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Time and New York Times.

‘Zeitoun’, released in 2009, won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and also made it to the Entertainment Weekly’s ‘End-of-the-Decade Best’. It also won the American Book Award, Northern California Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

‘A Hologram for the King’, released in 2012, found a place in the ‘10 Best Books of 2012’ list by editors of The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and Hollywood.com. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award.