The year after his 1935 graduation from Middlebury, he received his master's degree from the University of Chicago, and in 1939 began teaching at the University of Omaha. He left Omaha in 1942 when he took his Ph.D from Ohio State University. From 1942 to 1956, he was a professor at the University of Kansas City, whose English department he headed from 1952 to the end of his tenure, when he transferred to Brown University. John Shroeder, one of his students at Kansas, who later became a Brown English professor himself, recalled of Waggoner's lectures:
