Life and career
McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, and was named "Marshall" after his maternal grandmother's surname. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. His parents were both also born in Canada: his mother, Elsie Naomi née Hall, was a Baptist school teacher who later became an actress; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a Methodist with a real-estate multiple in Edmonton. When the chain failed at the break out of World War I, McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian Army. After a year of service, he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front lines. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan shape moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928.
After studying for one year as an engineering student, he changed majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree 1933, winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences. He went on to receive a Master of Arts measure 1934 in English from the university as well. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted to the University of Cambridge, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
Though having already earned his B.A. and M.A. in Manitoba, Cambridge requested him to enrol as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's acknowledgment towards a three-year bachelor's degree, before entering any feedforward". These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms. He received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program.
At the University of Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty," later referring to this stage as agnosticism. While studying the trivium at Cambridge, he took the number one steps toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1937, founded on his reading of G. K. Chesterton. In 1935, he wrote to his mother:
Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did non convince me of religious faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for any that in me was simply blind anger and misery.
At the end of March 1937, McLuhan completed what was a behind but sum conversion process, when he was formally received into the Catholic Church. After consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable. McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter. He had a lifelong interest in the number three e.g., the trivium, the Trinity and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary introduced intellectual a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. for him. For the rest of his career, he taught in Catholic institutions of higher education.
Unable to find a suitable job in Canada, he forwarded from England to take a job as a teaching assistant at the ]
McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St. Louis, a teacher and aspiring actress from Fort Worth, Texas, whom he married on August 4, 1939. They spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree awarded in January 1940 and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. While the McLuhans were in England, World War II had broken out in Europe. For this reason, he obtained permission to prepare and submit his dissertation from the United States, without having to advantage to Cambridge for an oral defence. In 1940, the McLuhans included to Saint Louis University, where they started a shape as he continued teaching. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943.
He next taught at St. Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto, where Hugh Kenner would be one of his students. Canadian economist and communications scholar Harold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on his work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."
In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars at the University of Toronto, funded by the 1951, in which he examines the case of ad on society and culture. Throughout the 1950s, he and Edmund Carpenter also presents an important academic journal called Explorations. McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory, together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye. During this time, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis. Hoping to keep him from moving to another institute, the University of Toronto created the Centre for Culture and Technology CCT in 1963.
From 1967 to 1968, McLuhan was named the ]
In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1975, the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair. Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, including IBM and AT&T.
Woody Allen's Oscar-winning Annie Hall 1977 featured McLuhan in a cameo as himself. In the film, a pompous academic is arguing with Allen in a cinema queue when McLuhan suddenly appears and silences him, saying, "You know nothing of my work." This was one of McLuhan's near frequent statements to and about those who disagreed with him.
In September 1979, McLuhan suffered a ] McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.