Dave Eggers.

• Author: Siegal, Nina
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

After the amazing success of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist that landed him a reported $2 million movie deal, author Dave Eggers could have easily made a comfortable life for himself resting on his literary laurels.

But Eggers, who at the time was twenty-nine, and, as he puts it, "embarrassed" by his sudden fame and wealth, didn't embrace the obvious--big publicity and big publishers--and instead made a number of interesting choices that shielded him from the mass media and enlarged the literary world around him.

He spurned corporate publishing offers and put out his next book, a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), through his own publishing house, McSweeney's. That book, coincidentally about a young American who has won what might be called an "embarrassing" cash windfall and travels the globe trying to give it away, was sold only through independent bookstores and on the Internet.

Then, Eggers poured his cash and energies into ventures that weren't exactly designed to make him richer: Under the McSweeney's rubric, and along with his wife, Vendela Vida, and writers Heidi Julavits and Ed Park, he co-founded a visually striking monthly magazine called The Believer , where "length is no object," and "there are book reviews that are not necessarily timely," according to its website. And he created a free writing program for poor children in San Francisco, called 826 Valencia (named for its address), which has mushroomed into a national literacy project, with centers in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Seattle.

Raised in the affluent Illinois suburb of Lake Forest, Eggers was orphaned while in his final year of college when both of his parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. He and his sister were left to raise their eight-year-old brother, Christopher, and moved to San Francisco, the story that's told in A Heartbreaking Work . There, he co-founded a short-lived magazine called Might , and then moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn.

In 1998, he co-founded the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the Web-based magazine Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency , with the stated goal of publishing fiction and nonfiction that had been ignored or rejected elsewhere. The talent and energy those attracted became the foundation for all his subsequent ventures--the publishing house, The Believer , the tutoring program, and retail stores that also function as indie literary clubhouses.

Meanwhile, he kept on writing. In 2004, he published How We Are Hungry , a collection of short stories, and last year he produced his most impressive work yet: What Is the What , a novel that tells the life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, who survived a massacre in his childhood home of Marial Bai, escaped civil war by walking 800 miles, and lived for a dozen years in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. The novel, which is essentially a dramatized version of Deng's life, is a collaboration, but it is Eggers's brilliant act of empathic ventriloquism that makes the story more than just a transcript of suffering. The book was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, and proceeds of the...