Frye and McLuhan

Northrop Frye started teaching at Victoria College in September of 1939, just as Marshall McLuhan began his PhD in England. Frye had studied for the church and worked as a student minister. But he hated theology and could not talk with people, so he quit preaching for another pulpit, one from which he could invent his own theology and do more writing than talking. McLuhan loved talking but hated Winnipeg, and so, with the help of an American aunt and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, he left Manitoba for Cambridge, first for a second undergraduate degree and then for a doctorate in medieval and early modern English literature. In the spring of 1946, he accepted an offer from St. Michael’s College, just south of Frye’s corner of the University of Toronto.

In the 1960s, Frye and McLuhan were the best-known Canadian intellectuals in the world. Even today, they remain the...