The son of John Vester and Dorothy Eloise (Hicks) McGee, he spent his early years in Knoxville, Tennessee.
In 1974 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, writing his dissertation "Edmund Burke's Beautiful Lie: An Exploration of the Relationship between Rhetoric and Social Theory" under Donald C. Bryant.
He is known for his materialistic views of rhetoric, summarized from the lesser-known McGee essay "The Practical Identity of Thought and Its Expression".
McGee was the first rhetorical theorist to propose this concept on an ideograph, which he described as, "an ordinary-language term found in political discourse.
McGee founded a website, (f)ragments, for rhetorical research and created a virtual learning community.