The family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, where Eggers attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn.

[5] 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.

[citation needed] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published in 2000, Eggers' first book, is 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.

[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.

The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, a specialist in the aftermath of prominent human rights abuses and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.

[10] Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

[11] Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.

In the early 2010s, after six years without publishing substantive literary fiction following What is the What, Eggers began a three-year streak of back-to-back novels, each broadly concerned with pressing social and political issues facing the United States and the world in the twenty-first century.

In April 2016, Eggers visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War.

[20][21] The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and published under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation in June 2017.

[24] Eggers followed Heroes of the Frontier with The Monk of Mokha (2018), another nonfiction biography in a similar vein to Zeitoun, billed by the publishers as "the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war.

According to the advance blurb from the publisher, the novel concerns "two men, Western contractors sent to work far from home, tasked with paving a road to the capital in a dangerous and largely lawless country.

"[26] Reviews were mixed: Positive notices included Andrew Motion's writing in The Guardian that "[Eggers'] novel may be sternly reduced in terms of its cast and language, but this leanness doesn't diminish the strength of its argument",[27] and Ron Charles in The Washington Post wrote that The Parade is "a story that conforms to the West's reductive attitudes about the developing world.

"[28] The Parade was followed in November 2019 by another short novella, The Captain and the Glory, billed by Eggers himself as an "allegorical satire"[29] of the Trump administration.

"[30] As with The Parade, reviews were decidedly mixed, with much criticism noting that Eggers' satire struggled to keep up with or do justice to the events of the Trump era.

In 2021, his novella The Museum of Rain was published,[36] and according to the McSweeney's website, the "elegiac" short story concerns "an American Army vet in his 70s who is asked to lead a group of young grand-nieces and grand-nephews on a walk through the hills of California's Central Coast.

McSweeney's also publishes The Believer, a monthly journal edited by Eggers's wife, Vendela Vida, and the now-defunct DVD magazine Wholphin.

In 2002, he and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for children and young adults.

[39] In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable.

Still, he publicly returned to visual art in 2010, with a solo gallery show at Electric Works in San Francisco, called "It Is Right to Draw Their Fur".

Outside of exhibitions, Eggers' visual art contributions include the following: Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the U.S. national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, which contained essays about each competing team in the tournament and was published with aid from the journal Granta.