Egolf was born in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain. His father, Brad Evans, was a National Review journalist and his mother, Paula, a painter. His younger sister is American actress Gretchen Egolf. As a Roman Catholic, his godparents were Leo Brent Bozell II and Patricia Lee Buckley. His parents divorced in Egolf's childhood and he took the surname of his stepfather, Gary Egolf. In his youth, the family moved from Washington to Kentucky. It was life in Philadelphia, however, that inspired Egolf, along with summer visits to his father's new home in Indiana. He graduated from Hempfield High School in Landisville, Pennsylvania, in 1990. Egolf briefly attended Temple University, in Philadelphia.

Egolf dropped out of Temple and formed a punk rock band, Kitschchao. The band was eventually offered a record deal and did release one 7" single on Compulsiv Records, but Egolf wanted to focus on his writing and moved to Paris, which he said was the best place to write about Kentucky, where Lord of the Barnyard was to be set. For 18 months, he wrote during the day and subsidized his rent by playing guitar in Irish bars and on the Pont des Arts as a street musician.

In Paris, Egolf struck up an acquaintance with the daughter of Patrick Modiano, a prominent French author and screenwriter (Lacombe Lucien). Modiano helped get his first novel published in France in 1998 by Gallimard after it had been rejected by more than 70 U.S. publishers. Lord of the Barnyard was subsequently published in the UK and the US and received moderately favorable reviews - with a few raves worldwide. His second book, Skirt and the Fiddle, was published in 2002 to even better critical response; his third, Kornwolf, was published after his death. He had also been working on a screenplay for Lord of the Barnyard, left unfinished.

Outside his writing, Egolf achieved some renown as a political agitator. In July 2004, he and a group of friends ... later known as the Smoketown Six ... were arrested outside Lancaster, Pa., for stripping down to thong underwear and piling on top of one another alongside a road being traveled by U.S. President George W. Bush to protest the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal.

On May 7, 2005, shortly after completing the manuscript for Kornwolf, Egolf committed suicide with a shotgun. He left behind a 9-month daughter.