The originator of such widely used phrases as "the global village" and "the medium is the message," Marshall McLuhan - the prescient media guru - is finally attracting the critical attention he deserves. In the 1960s, McLuhan blazed the intellectual territory which we are only coming to grips with today.

W. Terrence Gordon traces McLuhan's beginnings in the prairie city of Edmonton, Alberta, through his education at Cambridge and teaching in America to his startling breakthroughs in communication while at the University of Toronto. McLuhan's central place in the ferment of the 1960s is evocatively drawn and the formation of his most brilliant insights into the media are clearly explained.

This is the first book to mine McLuhan's extensive personal and public writings - journal entries; correspondence with family and luminaries such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Peter Drucker, and Clare Boothe Luce; manuscript notes and files; and all of his publications - to bring us an authoritative, well-rounded, and passionate portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.