Title on added t.p.: John Magee, the pilot poet.

Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 – December 11, 1941) was a British-American aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. He is undoubtedly most famous for his poem High Flight.


John Gillespie Magee: Born in Shanghai, China and spoke Chinese before English. His parents were missionaries, an American father and an English mother. He was educated at Rugby school in England and at Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut. He won a Scholarship to Yale, but instead joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in late 1940, trained in Canada, and was sent to Britain. He flew in a Spitfire squadron and was killed on a routine training mission on December 11, 1941. "Hoigh Flight" was sent to his parents written on the back of a letter, which said, "I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed. Magee’s parents lived in Washington, D.C., at the time of his death, and the sonnet came to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish. He acclaimed Magee the first poet of the War, and included the poem in an exhibition of poems of "faith and freedom" at the Library of Congress in February 1942.