Background information

About Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers, the author of the novel The Circle, was born in 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He grew up with his parents (a lawyer and a school teacher), his older brother and sister, and his younger brother. When Eggers was a child, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, and Eggers then went on to attend the University of Illinois to study journalism. 

However, while he was there, both his parents died of cancer in a very short period of time. Eggers dropped out of university at the age of 21 in order to care for his eight-year-old brother, moving to California to do so. Eggers tells the story of this experience in his first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). The book became a best-seller, launching his career as an author. 

He has since published a series of novels, beginning with You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) and including A Hologram for the King (2012), which explores the 2008 financial crisis. The following year he published The Circle (2013), which is now one of his best-known works. In 2021, he published The Every, a sequel to The Circle, which imagines a new ...