Joseph Campbell

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Campbell once told a packed lecture hall that if you follow your bliss, a track that has been there all the while will open up beneath your feet. That single sentence, first spoken to students in the 1970s, went on to reach tens of millions of viewers when it aired on public television in 1988 - six months after Campbell himself had died. How did a professor of literature at a small college in New York come to shape the way George Lucas made Star Wars, the way Disney built The Lion King, and the way countless novelists, songwriters, and game designers think about storytelling? And what happens when scholars take a closer look and find that the elegant pattern he saw in the world's myths is more complicated than it appears? Campbell was born in White Plains, New York, on the 26th of March 1904, and died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the 30th of October 1987. In between, he built one of the most influential - and contested - bodies of work in twentieth-century American intellectual life.

• 2. The Making of a Scholar

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  On a transatlantic ship in 1924, a twenty-year-old Campbell fell into conversation with Jiddu Krishnamurti, the messiah-elect of the Theosophical Society. That encounter ignited a lifelong interest in Hindu and Indian thought that would run through everything Campbell ever wrote. He had started out at Dartmouth studying biology and mathematics before deciding the humanities suited him better. He transferred to Columbia University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1925 and a Master of Arts in medieval literature in 1927. For a young man who would one day map the universal hero, he was himself athletic: for a time he ranked among the fastest half-mile runners in the world. A Columbia fellowship sent him back to Europe in 1927, where he studied Old French, Provencal, and Sanskrit in Paris and Munich and learned to speak both French and German. When he returned to Columbia in 1929 and asked to add Sanskrit and modern art to his medieval studies, faculty refused. Campbell walked away from graduate study entirely, later joking that holding a PhD in the liberal arts was a sign of incompetence. The decision turned out to matter. Without the constraints of an academic program, he was free to read everything.

• 3. Five Years in a Woodstock Shack

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  The Great Depression handed Campbell an unexpected gift. Unable to find conventional employment, he moved into a rented shack in Woodstock, New York, and spent the years from 1929 to 1934 reading nine hours a day. He would later describe dividing the day into four three-hour blocks, reading in three of them and keeping one free. During a year in California from 1931 to 1932, he became a close friend of the writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol - introduced through Carol's sister Idell, whom Campbell had met on a Honolulu cruise. On the Monterey Peninsula, both men fell under the influence of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, the model for the character Doc in Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Campbell lived next door to Ricketts for a stretch, and in 1932 accompanied him on a journey to Juneau, Alaska aboard a boat called the Grampus. Campbell even began writing a novel with Ricketts as its hero, though he never finished it. A scholar named Bruce Robison later wrote that Campbell would look back on this period as the time when everything in his life was taking shape. He could see, in one of Ricketts's unpublished philosophical essays, echoes of the patterns that would consume the rest of his career. In 1933, Campbell sold his first short story, Strictly Platonic, to Liberty magazine - the only piece of fiction he would ever successfully place.

• 4. Sarah Lawrence and the Long Teaching Life

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  In 1934, Campbell accepted a position at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where he would teach for the next 38 years. Four years into the job, he married the dancer-choreographer Jean Erdman, who had been one of his students. They shared a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village for most of their 49-year marriage, and in the 1980s bought a second apartment in Honolulu. Early in the Second World War, Campbell attended a lecture by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and the two became friends. When Zimmer died, Campbell spent the better part of the following decade editing and seeing Zimmer's papers through publication - six volumes in all. In 1955-1956, with the last of those Zimmer volumes finally going to press, Campbell took a sabbatical and traveled to Asia for the first time: six months in southern Asia, mostly India, and six months in East Asia, mostly Japan. The trip convinced him that comparative mythology needed to reach audiences far beyond the academy. In a 1957 New York Times article he discussed the books of the philosophy writer Alan Watts, signaling a growing interest in bringing these ideas to a general public. He retired from Sarah Lawrence in 1972, having shaped a generation of students through a curriculum that ranged from Navajo ceremony to the Sanskrit Upanishads.

• 5. The Monomyth

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  The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, began life as an introductory mythology class at Sarah Lawrence and was originally titled How to Read a Myth. Its central argument is that a common structure underlies the hero narratives of cultures across time and geography - the Call to Adventure, the receipt of supernatural aid, the encounter with a goddess or atonement with a father figure, and the eventual return. Campbell borrowed the word monomyth from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work he had already analyzed in the 1944 book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, co-written with Henry Morton Robinson. He leaned heavily on Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, deploying Jungian terms such as anima, animus, and ego consciousness throughout. The book argued that figures as different as Krishna, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana, and Jesus all draw on the same mythological reservoir. Campbell drew on the earlier concept of Adolf Bastian, who had distinguished between elementary ideas - the universal templates - and folk ideas, the local costumes those templates wear. He saw the hero's journey as the story of a man or woman who, through great suffering, reaches an experience of an eternal source and returns bearing gifts powerful enough to set their society free. Reprints of the book later placed Luke Skywalker on the cover, closing a circle Campbell never quite managed to draw himself.

• 6. Star Wars and the Popular Reach

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  George Lucas stated, following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, that its story was shaped in part by ideas in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's. Lucas's own account, recorded at length in the authorized Campbell biography A Fire in the Mind, describes a realization after American Graffiti that no generically American fairy tale had replaced the Western. He began reading Campbell and discovered, with what he called an eerie feeling, that his first draft of Star Wars was already following classic motifs. He then modified later drafts deliberately to align with what he had learned. It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas and Campbell actually met. In 1984, Campbell gave a lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco; Lucas was in the audience and the two were introduced through their mutual friend Barbara McClintock. Lucas later invited Campbell to Skywalker Ranch to watch all three films, and Campbell called them real art. This meeting led directly to the filming of The Power of Myth at Skywalker Ranch in 1988. Moyers and Lucas revisited the conversation in 1999 with a separate interview called Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas and Bill Moyers. The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution mounted an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, devoted to examining how Campbell's work shaped the films. A Hollywood screenwriter named Christopher Vogler distilled Campbell into a seven-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which contributed to the development of Disney's 1994 film The Lion King.

• 7. Follow Your Bliss

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  The phrase Campbell returned to most often had its roots in Sanskrit. He traced it to three terms from the Upanishads: Sat, meaning being; Chit, meaning consciousness; and Ananda, meaning bliss or rapture. His reasoning was personal: he told audiences he was uncertain whether his consciousness or his sense of being were properly calibrated, but he knew where his rapture was, and so he hung onto rapture and trusted it to bring the rest. He also suggested the idea may have been partly shaped by the 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt, and he quoted from it directly in The Power of Myth. By the time The Power of Myth aired on PBS in 1988, the phrase had become genuinely widespread among both religious and secular audiences in America. During his later years, when students began interpreting the maxim as an endorsement of hedonism, Campbell reportedly grumbled that he should have said follow your blisters instead. He had intended it not as permission for self-indulgence but as a practical map for moving through the hero journey he believed each person walks in their own life. The fourfold function of myth that he described throughout his work - awakening awe, explaining the cosmos, validating social order, and guiding individuals through the stages of life - was the broader philosophical architecture within which follow your bliss was meant to operate.

• 8. The Critics and the Contested Legacy

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  American folklorist Barre Toelken wrote that Campbell could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing stories that fit his preconceived mold and leaving out equally valid stories that did not fit the pattern. He traced the same source-selection bias into Robert Bly's 1990 Iron John. Alan Dundes, another American folklorist, designated Campbell a non-expert and argued that no single idea promulgated by amateurs had done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype. The anthropologist Raymond Scupin cited overgeneralization as the core problem with Campbell's reception in anthropology. Campbell's Sanskrit scholarship drew pointed personal criticism from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a former Sanskrit professor at the University of Toronto, who said Campbell had the most superficial knowledge of India but used it for his own aggrandizement. Richard Buchen, librarian of the Joseph Campbell Collection at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, offered a more measured counter-account: Campbell could not translate Sanskrit well, but worked closely with three scholars who could. The critic Camille Paglia, writing in Sexual Personae in 1990, called his work a fanciful, showy mishmash and described him as a false teacher. Charges of antisemitism surfaced in Tikkun magazine, where Tamar Frankiel noted that Campbell called Judaism the Yahweh Cult and spoke of it in almost exclusively negative terms. A 1989 New York Review of Books article by Brendan Gill amplified those charges, generating a sustained exchange of letters. Robert A. Segal catalogued 70 references to Campbell's writings on Jews and Judaism in a dedicated study. These controversies did not slow the expansion of Campbell's influence, but they did mark a persistent gap between his popular reputation and his standing in academic disciplines.