Joseph Campbell

1904-1987

    Joseph Campbell was born in New York City on July 25, 1904. As a child he was an avid reader of American Indian folklore. While working on his master's degree, his interest in the subject was revived. He traveled in Europe before attending Columbia University, where  he received an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature in 1927. He returned to Europe for postgraduate study in Arthurian romances at the Universities of Paris and Munich. Campbell found that many themes in Arthurian legend resembled the basic motifs in American  Indian folklore. During this time Campbell began his unending study of  authors Thomas Mann and James Joyce. He was also caught up in the theories of Jung.  Back in the United States, Campbell retired for five years to Woodstock, New York, and Carmel, California, where he put together his guiding thesis that  perceived myths as 'the pictorial vocabulary of communication from the  source zones of our energies to the rational consciousness'.

    In 1934 Campbell began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York,  where he remained for thirty-eight years. In 1938 he married Jean Erdman, who  founded a dance company and school of her own. Campbell began his writing career as a literary critic, co-authoring A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), a study of James Joyce's major novel.  He then turned his attention to explicating the great myths of the world's religions in terms of Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. He also  popularized the key discoveries and the psychology of Jung. Campbell argued  that world's mythologies, ritual practices, folk traditions, and major  religions share certain symbolic themes, motifs, and patterns of behavior.  His theories influenced a wide range of writers, among them the Finnish poet  Pentti Saarikoskiand and his Tiarnia series.

     In 1948, Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was published.  In his book Campbell bounded myths from Native Americans, ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, Mayans, Norse and Arthurian legends, and the Bible to elucidate the hero's path of  adventure through rite of passage to final transfiguration. During the  1950s Campbell worked on his four-volume series, The Masks of God.  In Myths  to Live By (1972) he suggested that new myths would replace old ones,  perhaps drawing symbols from modern technology.  As an editor Campbell compiled six volumes of Eranos Yearbooks (1954-69), he assisted Swami Nikhilananda in producing a translation of The Gospel of  Sriramakrishna (1942), edited The Portable Arabian Nights (1952), and  provided folkloric commentaries for The Complete Grimm Fairy Tales (1944).  

    From 1956 to 1973 he was a visiting lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute. In 1985 he received the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature and was elected in 1987 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  The popular PBS television program The Power of Myth was made in 1985 and 1986 mostly at the ranch of Campbell's friend, the film director George Lucas. His concept of the Hero's Journey was one of the sources for Star Wars film trilogy by Lucas. Campbell was Professor Emeritus until his death.  Campbell died at age of eighty-three on October 31, 1987, at his home in  Honolulu, Hawaii, after a brief illness.