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 contains top-notch fiction from today's leading writers. McSweeney's has since grown into McSweeney's Publishing which publishes two print magazines, "McSweeney's" and "The Believer", and prize-winning books. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, which is a non-profit organization with several locations in the United States: San Francisco (the original location, called 826 Valencia, after its street address), New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and Ann Arbor. Every location has its own unique storefront. The front of 826 Valencia is a Pirate Supply Store; the front of 826NYC is a Superhero Supply Company; etc. All proceeds from each store go toward the tutoring centers.
