Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. His 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights non-profit organisation Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.

Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in a family with three siblings. His father, John K. Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, and his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a schoolteacher. The family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, where Eggers attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn.

Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to earn a degree in journalism. However, his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both parents: his father in 1991 and his mother in 1992. These events were later chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At age 21, Eggers took responsibility for his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), and moved to Berkeley, California. His elder brother, William D. Eggers, is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, promoting privatization. Eggers's sister Beth died by suicide in November 2001.

Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine in San Francisco in 1994 with David Moodie and Marny Requa, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell) for SF Weekly.

Might evolved out of the small San Francisco-based independent paper Cups, and gathered a loyal following with its irreverent humor and quirky approach to the issues and personalities of the day. An article purporting to be an obituary of former 1980s child star Adam Rich (originally intended to be Back to the Future star Crispin Glover until Glover backed out) garnered some national attention. The magazine regularly included humor pieces, and several essays and nonfiction pieces by seminal writers of the 1990s, including "Impediments to Passion", an essay on sex in the AIDS era by David Foster Wallace.

Eggers later recounted in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that the magazine struggled to profit and stopped publication in 1997. An anthology of the best of Might magazine's brief run, 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp' and Other Essays from Might Magazine, was published in late 1998. By this time, Eggers was freelancing for Esquire and continuing to work for Salon.^{[citation needed]}

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published in 2000, is Eggers's first book, a memoir with fictional elements, and it focuses on his struggle to raise his younger brother in the San Francisco Bay Area following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy postscript entitled, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making.^{[citation needed]}

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. A version without the new material in Sacrament was created and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for a Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories, and three politically themed serials for Salon.