Herbert Marshall McLuhan, universally known as Marshall McLuhan, combined Cambridge University's New Criticism of literary textual analysis with the political economy-inspired communication theory of fellow Canadian and University of Toronto colleague Harold Innis. McLuhan was a leading scholar of popular communication media from the mid-1940s until his death in 1980 (which followed a stroke that had left him without his greatest gift, speech). An unconventional, colorful, and controversial professor of English who became the director of the Center of Culture and Technology of the University of Toronto, McLuhan rose to popular culture status himself with a handful of best-selling books and nonbooks published in the 1960s, including The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), and War and Peace in the Global Village (1968).

McLuhan created his own...