(1) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic) (University of Toronto Press, 1962) (for McLuhan's references to Ong's various publications about Ramus and Ramist logic, see the "Bibliographic Index," pp. 286-287);
(2) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (sic) (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
These two books in media-ecology studies catapulted McLuhan to unprecedented fame for an academic - and to extraordinary controversy for an academic. I characterize the controversies involving McLuhan as extraordinary because the various criticisms of McLuhan's thought and expression were often unusually personal for academic discourse at the time.
Now, in 2000, I published my award-winning book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press). In it, I surveyed Ong's life and eleven of his books and selected articles.
My book received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media-ecology, conferred by the Media-ecology Association on June 15, 2001.
I have discussed Ong's media-ecology thought in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Oh my God, did I ever make a life-defining choice when I was twenty years old and I decided to transfer to Saint Louis University as a junior English major! I understand the import of the subtitle of McChrystal's new 2025 book On Character.
Now, in 2025, Tom Cooper published his survey of Marshall McLuhan's life and work in his 660-page book titled Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (Connected Editions) - the revised and updated version of Cooper's 1979 doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, where both Innis and McLuhan taught for years.
Cooper credits both Innis and McLuhan with being the co-founders of the so-called Toronto School of Media-ecology. Even though Ong never taught at the University of Toronto, Ong is often regarded as being part of the Toronto School of Media-ecology. (As Cooper notes, there is also a so-called New York School of Media-ecology involving Neil Postman of New York University. For further information about Neil Postman, see Lance Strate's book titled Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition [Peter Lang, 2017]; Strate also discusses McLuhan and Ong.)
For further discussion of Cooper's new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers, see my OEN article titled "Tom Cooper on Harold Innis (1894-1952) and Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)" (dated May 24, 2025):
Now, you see, young Marshall McLuhan taught English at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri (USA), from 1937 to 1944. As part of young Walter Ong's long Jesuit formation, he was sent to Saint Louis University for graduate studies in philosophy and English. Young Ong took at least one course in English from young McLuhan, and young McLuhan served as the director of young Ong's Master's thesis on sprung rhythm in the recently posthumously published poetry of the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Ong's 1941 Master's thesis was published, slightly revised in 1949 in a collection of essays about Hopkins' poetry by Jesuits. Ong's slightly revised 1941 Master's thesis is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 111-174).
At the time when young Ong wrote his Master's thesis on sprung rhythm in Hopkins' poetry, neither young Ong nor young McLuhan was thinking in terms of media-ecology studies. Their respective interest in media-ecology studies came years later in their respective lives as Renaissance specialists. Nevertheless, Ong's study of sprung rhythm in Hopkins' poetry in 1941 shows his early interest in sound. Remember that Ong's big breakthrough media-ecology insight came in the early 1950s when he wrote about the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history.
Now, for a cogent critique of Ong's account of Hopkins' sprung rhythm, James I. Wimsatt's book Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (University of Toronto Press, 2006).
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