American author, editor and publisher Dave Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lake Forest, a small town near Chicago, Illinois. His father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. Dave Eggers studied journalism at the University of Illinois, but dropped out when both his parents became ill with cancer. His father died in 1991 and his mother the following year. Eggers was twenty-one years old when he became legal guardian for his eight-year-old brother Christopher while his older sister Beth and brother Bill were busy studying and working full time, and they moved to Berkeley, California, to live with Beth. Dave Eggers subsisted on money left by his parents and by freelancing as a graphic designer. Together with a friend he took over the local free newspaper Cups, which was later turned into the literary magazine Might, edited by Eggers. He then moved to San Francisco where he founded the quarterly McSweeney's in 1998, now a major forum for new American writing. Contributors include David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Lethem.