During the last decade or so of his life, Harold Innis was undoubtedly the single most influential academic figure in Canada. Trained as an economic historian, he became interested in economic geography and during the later years of his life in the study of communications as a tool for understanding political stability and cultural creativity. Aside from his publications Innis exerted tremendous influence through his position as head of the University of Toronto's Department of Political Economy; later he was also dean of the graduate school.

Although Innis eventually made a reputation which placed him in the forefront of his contemporary economic historians and made him welcome in such diverse centers of learning as Chicago, Oxford, and Moscow, the atmosphere in which he was raised was more rustic than sophisticated. Innis was born on 5 November 1894 on a farm near Otterville, Ontario. Both his mother, Mary Adams, and his...