Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta. "I think of western skies as one of the most beautiful things about the West, and the western horizons," he once said. "The westerner doesn't have a point of view. He has a vast panorama…a total field of vision." Mindful of this advantage, McLuhan professed not to be bothered, at least in retrospect, by his growing up in a backwater—his family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, a few years after his birth and McLuhan remained there until he attained an M.A. in English literature from the University of Manitoba in 1934. The periphery, the margins, provided another excellent field of vision, according to McLuhan—one reason he remained in Canada, for the most part, until his death in 1980.

His father, a genial but unambitious man, sold life insurance; his mother, a restless, domineering force, was an elocutionist who gave dramatic monologues in theatres and church basements. McLuhan acquired from her a remarkable facility both for memorization and impromptu speech. If he had a weakness, it was his inability to listen to speakers less forceful than he was. His forte, on the other hand, was talking tirelessly not only in brilliantly articulate sentences but whole paragraphs—a form of communication he much preferred to writing.

After leaving Manitoba, he spent two years acquiring a B.A. from Cambridge University. There he studied under I. A. Richards, a psychologist turned literary critic who examined the process of reading.
For Richards it was not the paraphrasable content of a poem that mattered but the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader. In later years, McLuhan adapted this technique to the study of media, inspired as well by another Cambridge professor, F. R. Leavis, who urged his students to analyze their cultural environment— advertisements in particular—in the same way they analyzed literature. McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, was very much an exercise in cultural criticism in the Leavis mode, a series of essays on advertisements, laying bare their cultural roots and assumptions.

After he left Cambridge in 1936, McLuhan taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin, and then, following his conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis. There he married a Texas drama student named Corinne Keller Lewis, with whom he had six children. In 1944 he returned to Canada where he taught for two years at what was then known as Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, before finally settling at the University of Toronto, his home for the rest of his career. Here he met a political economist named Harold Innis who had discovered that certain media of communication are time based and certain media—more portable and ephemeral—are space based. Working with this hint, and discovering simultaneously in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake, a critique of radio and television, McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user.

Aided by a Ford Foundation grant, McLuhan and a few collaborators, notably the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, produced a periodical entitled Explorations—consisting of eight issues, from 1953 to 1957— laying out these perceptions. The articles by McLuhan in this periodical remain the best introduction to his work.

—by Philip Marchand, July, 2002.

Philip Marchand is the author of the biography, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Random House of Canada Limited, 1989. Paperback, 1990, Vintage Canada. Revised, 1998, with a Foreword by Neil Postman. ISBN: 0-679-30929-2