There is something deeply, unfashionably honourable about the career of writer and editor Dave Eggers, whose latest book details an outrageous miscarriage of justice in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, writes LOUISE EAST

WHEN AUTHOR Dave Eggers met Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy for the first time, it seemed to Eggers he had walked in on the perfect all-American family. The Zeitoun kids ran in and out of the family home in New Orleans. The Zeitouns run a popular painting business out of the house, and a steady stream of workers knocked at the back door, looking for wages and catching up on news of the latest job.

Eggers and the Zeitouns chatted about Abdulrahman’s family back in Syria and about how he met Kathy after he had decided to settle in the US. They talked a little about Kathy’s conversion to Islam in her early 20s, before she met Abdulrahman, whose name is so tricky everyone just calls him Zeitoun. The Zeitouns’ story struck Eggers as a typical American tale of hard work and opportunity, of salting the new world with the old.

Yet when Hurricane Katrina pounded and pummelled the Zeitouns’ home town of New Orleans in 2005, Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s reaction was not in the least bit typical. Rather than fleeing with Kathy and the kids, or choosing to bed down in the grim squalor of the Superdome, Zeitoun resurrected an old metal canoe and took to the flooded streets, paddling through his neighbours’ windows to bring them water, feeding the city’s starving dogs, carefully helping the old and sick to find rescue.

Sadly, the official response to Zeitoun’s altruism wasn’t what you might expect either: no speeches or citations, no keys to the city, no “local hero” stories in the press. One day, as Zeitoun hopped out of his canoe to call Kathy on a precious working payphone, he was jumped on by a Swat team armed to the teeth with everything but an explanation.

For weeks, while Kathy simmered with grief and fear and frustration (she heard nothing and presumed the worst), Zeitoun was held in an impromptu prison, nicknamed Camp Greyhound because it was thrown up in the old bus station. There was no trial, no phone call, no lawyers and still no explanation for why he was there, unless you counted the accusations of prison guards who whispered “al-Qaeda, Taliban”.

Now, five years later, what sets Zeitoun apart from the hundreds of other innocent people who served what’s been sourly nicknamed “Katrina time” is that his story came to the attention of Dave Eggers. After meeting the family, Eggers recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with the Zeitouns. He travelled to Syria, met family, and compiled a near-obsessive array of independent corroboration in the shape of news footage, radio reports, satellite images and weather analysis.

Zeitounwears this research lightly, and for a book detailing an outrageous miscarriage of justice, it is short on outrage. Instead the Zeitouns' story, and that of New Orleans during the grade-five hurricane, unfurls as calmly and addictively as a good thriller, and it's the reader who starts foaming over with anger.

“I thought the best way to express whatever rage I, and many of us, feel about what happened was just to tell this one story, to show the effect it had on one family,” says Eggers. “I went into it knowing I wasn’t going to be a strong authorial presence. My training was in journalism, taught by old-school Chicago newspapermen, who told us to get out of the way of the story. Tell it plainly and clearly and do away with that flowery stuff.”

Eggers grins uneasily. He hasn’t always stuck to the rules regarding “flowery stuff”.

“Usually, I write everything as a maximalist,” he admits. “I’m known for going on and on.”

The title of Eggers's first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is a hint at the exuberant, tricksy maximalism he's known for. Published in 2000, it's a memoir about bringing up his little brother, Toph, after the death of their parents. He named it with his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek, only to discover that several million readers agreed with him. "Listen, I didn't think that memoir would make sense to anybody," he says. "The publisher didn't think it would either. Nobody thought it would sell. I just felt lucky to have finished it and flabbergasted that anybody read it. I never felt entitled to that."

Eggers's career in the aftermath of A Heartbreaking Work'ssuccess is one of the most unusual in contemporary writing, not least because it is also deeply, unfashionably, honourable. On the writing side, there is McSweeney's (named with a nod to Eggers's mother's family, who hailed from Co Kerry), a publishing concern which puts out a quarterly journal of magnificent inconsistency – one month it might be a comic book, the next a box of playing cards, the next a bundle of mail – as well as a monthly magazine, The Believer, edited by his wife, novelist Vendela Vida.

Last year, he and Vida co-wrote the script of Sam Mendes's Away We Go, and with director Spike Jonze, Eggers turned Maurice Sendak's cult picture-book, Where the Wild Things Are, into a film script. An Eggers novel, The Wild Things, also appeared late last year, and there have been regular collections of Eggers short stories, a novel and several kids' books.

In all, Eggers’s bibliography as either writer or editor numbers more than 13 titles; not bad for a writer just turned 40. Somehow though, Eggers finds time for a plethora of the kind of projects which used to be called “good works”. There’s 826 National, a children’s literacy programme now operating in eight cities across the US. Each centre is installed behind a fantastical shop selling supplies to pirates (San Francisco), superheroes (New York) or space travellers (Seattle) which provide funds, lure kids in and amuse journalists.

Then there's the Voice of Witnessseries which publishes first-person accounts of human rights issues such as wrongful conviction or slavery; there's regular high-school teaching, and advocacy work aimed at getting higher wages for teachers. A brand new Eggers-created website has just gone live – called Scholarmatch, it elicits funding for low-income college students.

It's difficult to get Eggers to talk about why he does all this; he's happy as a clam talking about the projects themselves, but grows visibly uncomfortable discussing his own involvement. The Zeitouns' story first came to light as part of the Voice of Witnessseries but when Eggers read it, he realised: "As much as we want to reach as wide as possible an audience, they just don't reach as wide an audience as . . ." He breaks off, pauses for a long stretch and finally offers, "as other books can".

In other words, Eggers realised his involvement would bring the Zeitouns’ story to a larger, more influential audience, and because theirs is not just the story of one family, but a cautionary tale demonstrating the noxious symptoms of Bush-era policy and mismanagement, he jumped right in.

“This was a systematic breakdown where every aspect of the system, and of its checks and balances, failed,” says Eggers. “Under Clinton, FEMA was an exemplary agency. Bush and Cheney folded it into homeland security and its obsession became anti-terror measures, and that resulted in this overwhelmingly military response to a humanitarian crisis.”

Proof that combining consciousness-raising and popular literature works is evidenced by the success of Eggers' 2006 book, What is the What, which lightly fictionalised the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee who ended up in Atlanta after his own country disintegrated into a brutal civil war.

Once Eggers got to work on Deng's story it was read by millions of people who didn't know they were interested in a civil war in Sudan. Proceeds from the book went into a foundation, administered by Deng, which has recently opened a school in his home town (a similar foundation has been set up to distribute the royalties of Zeitoun).

“Telling Valentino’s story simplified, or at least made sense of a conflict which was almost ignored during its time because everyone considered it just too complex to unravel,” says Eggers. “But through one man’s eyes it becomes that bit clearer. As human beings, we tell stories about our own lives or those of people we know and that’s how we get at the meaning of something.”

The interviews with Abdulrahman Zeitoun took place over three years as Eggers slowly elicited every last detail of that summer five years ago. “What we find again and again is that when somebody decides to tell their story they use that forum to tell their story in great detail for the first time. That one person with a tape-recorder becomes the vessel.”

AFTER 18 MONTHS, Eggers sent the Zeitoun family some sample chapters, to make sure he was getting it right.

“One of them included the time Zeitoun was first brought into Camp Greyhound and strip-searched, and Kathy e-mailed after reading it saying she was crying. He had never mentioned it before.”

Writing at one remove from himself – through the voice of Achak or Zeitoun, and even, in a very different way, by using the work of Maurice Sendak as a springboard – seems to suit Eggers, who reacts to an enquiry about whether he’ll write another memoir with comedy horror.

“No! God, no. I think I scratched that itch all at once with my first book. There isn’t that much else to say. Every time I come to the end of a book, I feel ‘wow, I actually wrote a book’. It’s startling to me. But whatever skills I’ve learned along the way, I think they’re best applied to telling stories outside of myself.

“I like the process of learning something new and I don’t want to learn something new about myself. I did that. I think memoir is a great process of discovery and ordering and you can heal a bit, there’s a cathartic element, but then it’s done.”

In the last seven years, Eggers has done several books back-to-back, two of them telling someone else’s story. Now he’s looking forward to taking it easy, spending a bit more time with his and Vida’s two children back in San Francisco.

“Working with real human beings, you feel obligated to do right by their stories. I’m ready to take a little bit of a break, and enjoy not having a crushing deadline on my head. It’s been a long road.”

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, is published by Hamish Hamilton, priced £18.99