ABSTRACT
A marvy year for Marshall McLuhan, take it all in all. Tom Wolfe compared him with Darwin, Freud, and Einstein; Susan Sontag said in public she thought he was swell. London saw him as an epoch maker and intellectual frontiersman (Encounter and the Times Lit Supp), and The New Yorker reviewed him rapt. What is more, Academe—after a period of sitting tall but silent on his bandwagon—began talking out loud about his work. (One example: a recent international convocation of savants at Southern Illinois University spent days discussing the “communications revolution” in open session—mainly in McLuhanian terms.) Success being what it is, wasps and carpers were doubtless waiting for the man a piece or two up the road. But no amount of carping could obscure the facts of his rise. Overnight the author of Understanding Media had emerged as Midcult’s Mr. Big. And ahead of him lay a shot at mass adulation and the title of Everyman’s Favorite Brain.
