Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year. Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and… literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States. Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013.
Scott Turow is a writer and lawyer. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 12, 1949. He received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1970 and an M.A. from Stanford University in 1974. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978. He was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago and served as a prosecutor in several corruption cases. Turow continues to work as an attorney. He has written numerous novels including Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, The Laws of Our Fathers, Personal Injuries, Ordinary Heroes, Limitations, Innocent, and Identical. His non-fiction works include One L about his experience as a law student and Ultimate Punishment about the death penalty.… He has won numerous awards including the Heartland Prize in 2003 for Reversible Errors, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 2004 for Ultimate Punishment, and Time Magazine's Best Work of Fiction, 1999 for Personal Injuries.