In 1951, McLuhan published his first book, The Mechanical Bride . It had been long in the making—since his days at Wisconsin, in fact. For years McLuhan had been gathering magazine advertisements and writing essays about them, analyzing not only their rhetorical strategies, but the underlying social attitudes they conveyed. It was a form of social criticism partly inspired by his old Cambridge professor, F. R. Leavis, whose Culture and Environment , published in 1933, had urged literary intellectuals to study radio broadcasts, advertisements, and popular journalism in an effort to combat their inherent philistinism.
