Dave Eggers (born in 1970) is an American writer. His first book was a memoir of his parents' death, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). His first (and so far only) novel is You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002). An expanded and revised version of You Shall Know Our Velocity titled Sacrament was released in limited quantities in 2003 . In 2004 , a collection of his short stories, How We Are Hungry: Stories was published. He is currently the editor of McSweeney's, a quarterly literary journal, and is serializing his next novel, about "the American political circus", on Salon.com.

Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before he became a writer he was "a poorly paid Salon editor" and founding editor of Might magazine.

Eggers is most closely identified with the literary scene in San Francisco, where he lives. He started 826 Valencia, San Francisco's only independent pirate supply store (a front for a writing workshopfor students).

With his younger brother Toph, Eggers has published a pair of "educational" books for children under the name Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey. Their books, critically received as a postmodern attack on science's "self-serving attempt to disseminate knowledge through encyclopedia sets," ask the hard-hitting questions that other children's books avoid, like 'Do giraffesstill control everything we see in mirrors?'