Marshall McLuhan was a satirist and prophetic poet, a pop guru adopted by Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen, and others, a North American precursor of French theory (Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze), an artist, and a shaman. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan sheds new light on McLuhans many roles and offers a background to his influential writings. Donald Theall explores McLuhans significance for theories of culture, communication, and technology. He reveals important information about McLuhan and his relationship with his earliest collaborator and life-long friend, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, as well as with Theall himself, McLuhans first doctoral student. The McLuhan who emerges is at once attractive, witty, egotistic, and exasperating. Complex and thoughtful, neither uncritical adulation nor demonization, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan does justice to a unique figure caught in a struggle between tradition and modernity, faith and anarchy.