"[10] After growing up in Boston and on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, D'Agata attended the liberal preparatory school Northfield Mount Hermon on a scholarship.

He has emphasized that the essay should make, and not merely take; that it should gamble with the fictive and not just trade in the real; that it should entertain uncertainty as often as it hosts opinion; that the essay can be as lyrical, as fragmented, as self-interrupting, and as self-conscious as the most experimental fiction or verse.D'Agata is also the author of Halls of Fame,[16] a collection of experimental nonfiction about which David Foster Wallace wrote, "In nothing else recent is the compresence of shit and light that is America so vividly felt and evoked".

[19] Called by NPR "the most improbably entertaining book ever written,"[20] The Lifespan of a Fact[21] is a retrospectively reconstructed and embellished exchange between D'Agata and his one-time fact-checker, Jim Fingal.

[22] The book illustrates their heated seven-year battle over a single essay by D'Agata that was ultimately published in The Believer magazine.

In the book, D'Agata and Fingal discuss whether it is appropriate to change facts in writing that is both nonfiction and art.

In 2018, The Lifespan of a Fact was made into a Broadway, one-act play starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale.