In 1960, Harvard University Press published Albert B. Lord's book about oral tradition involving non-literate performers, The Singer of Tales.
In 1962, the University of Toronto Press published Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, which Ong told us in the spring of 1966 in a course I took from him to read with a grain of salt. Ong never tired of praising his former teacher.
In 1963, Harvard University Press published Eric A. Havelock's very accessible classic study of the Homeric oral mentality.
Ong never tired of referring to Lord's and Havelock's books.
In 1964, Ong delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale University, which were published as The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967).
In the fall of 1964, I took my first upper-division English course from Ong at SLU, Practical Criticism: Poetry. In the spring of 1966, I took Practical Criticism: Prose from him.
In 1967, Macmillan published Ong's collection In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture.
In 1967-1968, Ong served as one of 14 persons on the White House Task Force on Education, which reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.
In 1971, Ong was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1971, Cornell University Press published Ong's big collection Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture.
In 1974, Ong was selected as one of about a dozen Americans who served as Lincoln Lecturers and went on lecture tours abroad in connection with the 25th anniversary of the Fulbright Act.
In 1977, Cornell University Press published Ong's other big collection Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. In the preface Ong explicitly articulates what he styles his relationist thesis regarding cultural developments being related to transformations of the word (9-10).
In 1978, Ong served as the elected president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association of America.
In 1979, Ong delivered the Messenger Lectures at CornellUniversity, which were published as Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981).
In 1981, Ong delivered the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, which were published as Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
In 1982, Methuen published in the New Accents series Ong's most widely known book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (now published by Routledge).
