Dave Eggers

When Dave Eggers was 21 and living in Lake Forest, Illinois, both his parents died of cancer five weeks apart, leaving Eggers to raise his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. He moved to California and, though he tried to continue his life as a cool young San Francisco bohemian, he was also leading a not-so-secret double life as a single "dad" raising a son in Berkeley. In 1993, Eggers founded the now-defunct Might Magazine. After a brief stint as a writer at Esquire, he published a tragicomic memoir entitled "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", recounting his family tragedies. The book became the literary sensation of the year; Eggers was hailed as "the J.D. Salinger of Generation X", and the book was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1998, Eggers returned to the avant-garde magazine world with the eccentric www.McSweeneys.net online magazine. This developed into Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary quarterly that comes out in a different form every issue and co