*** W. Terrence Gordon (M.A., Ph.D, University of Toronto) is a linguist and intellectual historian who has taught in six Canadian universities.

*** He held the Alexander McLeod Chair in Modern Languages at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia and has authored and edited more than twenty books.

*** In 1979, he became the first North American scholar to publish in the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure (Geneva).

*** In 1988, he became the first North American scholar to be granted research funding by the Basic English Foundation (U.K.).

*** In 1995, he was commissioned by the McLuhan family to write the biography of Marshall McLuhan (published in 1997 as Escape into Understanding). His mass-market paperback introductions to McLuhan (McLuhan for Beginners, Everyman’s McLuhan, and McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed) are widely popular and have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, etc.

*** In 2001 he became the principal editor of the McLuhan publishing program for Gingko Press (San Francisco/Hamburg), producing new critical editions of Understanding Media, McLuhan Unbound, The Classical Trivium, and From Cliché to Archetype.

From reviews of Escape into Understanding

“Not only a detailed life but an attempt to do justice to McLuhan’s ideas…Gordon’s biography will have an esteemed place.” -New York Times Book Review

“[A] splendid biography….McLuhan…comes across as a fascinatingly complex figure…Gordon interprets McLuhan lucidly and effectively.” ¬-Boston Globe

“A fine and careful book that presents the first fully realized portrait of one of the truly prescient thinkers of this or any other time.” – Lewis Lapham

“This book thrilled me. It brought back the McLuhan I knew and much more: the complex family background and a sense of how McLuhan became McLuhan. It is also a brilliantly critical evaluation of McLuhan’s work.” –Derrick de Kerckhove

“Written in the best tradition of intellectual biography, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding will infect readers with the vitality of McLuhan’s ideas, drawing them with an in indelible image of the warm, whimsical, spiritual man whose playful conceptual explorations revolutionized the way we see the world.” Innovationwatch.com

“The really wonderful thing about this definitive biography of my father is that throughout I hear his voice again. Dad had a distinctive way of speaking both publicly as well as in the intimacy of family situations. Frequent recourse to Marshall's diaries ensures that there is a personal intimacy and veracity that is missing in most accounts of my father's life. Gordon has found his voice and he remains completely true to it throughout this book. His research is exhaustive”. –Michael McLuhan