McLuhan, Marshall, 1911-1980 : Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on 21 July 1911, the son of Herbert Ernest McLuhan, a salesman, and Elsie Naomi (Hall) McLuhan, an actress and monologist. He attended the University of Manitoba from 1929 to 1935, obtaining a BA in English in 1934, winning the University Gold Medal as the most outstanding student in the Arts and Sciences, and receiving a Master of Arts in 1935. He was a finalist for the Manitoba Rhodes Scholarship, but did win another scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge he was tutored by Lionel Elvin, I. A. Richards, and F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, founders of the 'New Criticism' that emphasised close analysis of literary texts. McLuhan credited this training as an extremely formative influence on his approach to studying media and communication. In 1943, Cambridge awarded him a PhD for his thesis entitled "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time".
In the meantime, McLuhan joined the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1936 and moved the following year to St Louis University, Missouri, which had been founded by the Jesuits. McLuhan joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1937. He returned to Canada in 1944, joining the English faculty of Assumption College in Windsor, a university run by the Basilian Order. In 1946 he joined the English faculty of St Michael's College, a Catholic college within the University of Toronto, where he would remain until his death.
In the early 1950s McLuhan began studying communications and media. The Ford Foundation sponsored his seminar on culture and communications from 1953 to 1955, and funded a periodical entitled Explorations that investigated the impact of advertising, which he co-edited with anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. McLuhan later directed a media project for the United States Office of Education and the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (1959-1960) titled "Understanding New Media". With his growing international stature, the University of Toronto established the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963 with McLuhan as its director, in part to ensure that he remained at the University. The Centre conducted research on questions of sensory perception and other communications-related issues and offered academic courses. In December 1966, McLuhan was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in New York City, a post he held for the 1967-1968 academic year.
McLuhan's books published during his lifetime included "The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man" (1951); "Explorations in Communications" (1960), co-edited with Edmund Carpenter; "The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man" (1962), for which he was awarded the Governor General's prize for critical prose; "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964); "The Medium is the Massage" (1967), written with Quentin Fiore; "War and Peace in the Global Village" (1968), also written with Quentin Fiore; "Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting" (1968), co-authored with Harley Parker; "Counterblast" (1969); also written with Harley Parker; "The Interior Landscape: Selected Literary Criticism" (1969); "Culture is Our Business" (1970); "From Cliché to Archetype" (1970), written with Wilfred Watson; "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout" (1972), written with Barrington Nevitt; and "The City as Classroom" co-authored with his son Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon in 1977. McLuhan's only book-length work of literary criticism was his 1956 edition of the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, entitled "Selected Poetry of Tennyson". In addition to these works, McLuhan wrote hundreds of articles, was interviewed for numerous journals and popular magazines, and delivered many lectures and informal talks on a variety of topics. He also edited an information letter, "The Dew Line."
McLuhan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964; received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Social Sciences in 1967; and became a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour, in 1970. He suffered a major stroke in September 1979 and died at home in Toronto on 31 December 1980.
