the age. Advertisers knew instinctively that their job was not to convey an idea or a concept, but to achieve an effect—just as poets know that they must use language to create the kind of effect they want. Although he hated the corrupt use of art in advertising, McLuhan nevertheless insisted that advertisements would lose their power over us only when we paid serious attention to them.
The major event of his life at Wisconsin was his conversion to Catholicism, which led him to look for employment in a Catholic university. In 1937 he was hired as an instructor in the English department of a Jesuit university, St. Louis University.
From St. Louis, he conducted a courtship of Corinne Lewis, an actress from Fort Worth, Texas, whom he had met while
