In 1962 Edgerton enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, eventually majoring in English.
During this time he was a student in the Air Force ROTC program where he learned to fly a small plane.
After graduating in 1966, he entered the Air Force and served five years as a fighter pilot in the United States, Korea, Japan, and Thailand.
[citation needed] He decided to become a writer in 1978 after watching Eudora Welty read a short story on public television.
[2][3] His later work, Killer Diller, is a thinly veiled satire of that university and its administration, with whom Edgerton clashed over Raney.