a writer, and could hold forth in front of audiences for hours.
The McLuhan family, after a series of moves prompted by economic woes and the dislocation caused by World War I, settled in a modest, middle-class area of Winnipeg in 1921. McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba as an English student in 1928—a natural course for a young man brought up in a household which, however divided by emotional conflicts, was united in its reverence for books and education. McLuhan, with a few exceptions, found his teachers inadequate and suspected, rightly, that he was receiving a second-rate education.
The most lasting intellectual experience from this period of his life was his discovery of the English essayist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Chesterton’s intellectual agility, his love
