Early Life and Education
Magee was born in 1884 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Magee came from a wealthy Pittsburgh family. His brother was aviator and Congressman James McDevitt Magee. Magee went to school at Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and then on to divinity school in Massachusetts. A missionary in China, he was the minister at an Episcopal mission in Nanking from 1912 to 1940.
While in China, Magee married a missionary from England, Faith Emmeline Backhouse. They had four sons: John, Hugh, David and Christopher. Their first son was named after his father: John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who went on to write the famous poem, "High Flight."
Read more about this topic: John Magee (missionary)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week’s seasickness to experience.... To me the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)