From Fox:

Elected 1998, 1st term up 2004
Born: June 10, 1953, Seneca, SC
Home: Raleigh
Education: NC St. U., B.S. 1974, U. of NC at Chapel Hill, J.D. 1977
Religion: Methodist
Marital Status: married (Elizabeth)
Professional Career: Practicing atty., 1977-98.

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS
· Edwards grew up in the small North Carolina town of Robbins, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother ran a small store.
· Edwards was the first in his family to go to college.
· In college, he opposed the Vietnam War and Nixon.
· Edwards registered for the draft in 1971, received a high lottery number for induction, and was never called to serve.
· After graduating from North Carolina State University with a degree in textile sciences, he went to law school at the University of North Carolina.
· There at the University of North Carolina he met his wife-to-be, a law student four years his senior. They pursued legal careers and had two children, Catharine and Wade.
· Upon graduating, he moved to Tennessee to join former Republican Governor Lamar Alexander’s law firm.
· In 1981, he returned to North Carolina, to the politically well-connected Raleigh law firm of Wade Smith, a former Democratic Party state chairman.
· He won his first multi-million dollar verdict in 1984, which he followed the next year with a $6.5 million verdict for a 6-year-old girl who’d suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital — at the time, the largest verdict in state history.
· In 1990, he was the youngest member inducted into The Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the nation’s top 100 trial lawyers.
· Edwards left in 1993 to start his own firm with David Kirby.
· Edwards’ son Wade died in 1996 when the car he was driving flipped.
· Setting a record for North Carolina, Edwards won a $25-million jury award in 1997.
· Edwards accrued more than 45 million-dollar judgments or settlements during his career.
· In 1998, at the age of 48, Elizabeth Edwards gave birth to Emma Claire; she was 50 when their son was born two years later.
· Edwards’ 1998 Senate campaign against Republican incumbent Lauch Faircloth was his first venture into politics. Before he was elected to the Senate in 1998, he had never held office. Edwards won with 51.2% of the vote.
· Edwards spent $6 million of their fortune to unseat Faircloth in 1998.
· On September 7, 2003, Edwards made the most momentous decision of his presidential campaign: to drop out of his 2004 Senate reelection race.
· Edwards comes from a swing state the Democrats haven’t carried since 1976.

That’s just the basic goods. We’ll have more on Edwards on the issues later.