One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity

Abstract

On the news of the passing of J. D. Salinger early in 2010 the New Yorker magazine asked Dave Eggers to write a few words in his honour. To anyone familiar with the work and lives of these two American authors the commission is striking. Salinger, the recluse famed for the iconic coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, gave American culture Holden Caulfield, a teenager obsessed with authenticity and popular culture in equal measure. Eggers, a writer who shot to fame by cataloguing his life after the death of his parents in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusoffered readers at the end of the twentieth century an equally compelling portrait of youth in a mode that might easily be described as ‘Caulfield-esque’.