ABSTRACT
Marshall McLuhan (b. 1911) was born and brought up in Canada. He studied at Manitoba University and subsequently at Cambridge, England, where he experienced the teaching of Dr F. R. Leavis. McLuhan's own early criticism (mainly periodical essays written while he was teaching at St Louis University) was somewhat Leavisian in character, defending and interpreting the work of certain modern writers as preservers of important cultural values in the hostile environment of mass society. In the 1940s, however, McLuhan moved towards a more objective, more analytical engagement with mass culture, of which the first result was his study of modern advertising, The Mechanical Bride: folklore of industrial man (New York, 1951). This pioneering study was almost entirely ignored until The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographical man (1962) made McLuhan a figure of international fame and controversy. He is now Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
