/ Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell

For Joseph Campbell, the study of mythology was never about creating new translations of dusty old stories, but rather about the flourishing of the human spirit. In his view, 'Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.' His accessible, warm, and wise writings enable us to find in mythology a roadmap to personal transformation.

Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was highly influenced by some of the great names and works in art, literature, philosophy, psychology, mythology, and anthropology. References to James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Upanishads, and the Bible appear throughout his writings.

Joseph Campbell.s first, full-length, solo work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII: 1949), was published to acclaim and brought him the first of numerous awards and honours.the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contributions to Creative Literature. In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the existence of a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture, and is an operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but for a culture as well. The Hero would prove to have a major influence on generations of creative artists, and would, in time, come to be acclaimed as a classic.

Joseph authored dozens of articles and numerous other books, including The Masks of God series, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986); and five books in his four-volume, multi-part, unfinished Historical Atlas of World Mythology (1983-87).

He was also a prolific editor. Over the years, he edited works such as The Portable Arabian Nights (1952) and was general editor of the series Man and Myth (1953-1954), which included major works by Maya Deren, Carl Kerenyi, and Alan Watts. He also edited The Portable Jung (1972), as well as six volumes of Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Bollingen Series XXX).

In 1988, millions were introduced to his ideas by the broadcast on PBS of Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, six hours of an electrifying conversation that the two men had videotaped over the course of several years.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation initiated a project called The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series, to release new, authoritative editions of Campbell's published and unpublished writing, as well as audio and video recordings of his lectures. These books include 'Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation', 'Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor', and 'The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987.'

Biographical details

On March 26th in 1904, Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, NY. Joe, as he came to be known, was the first child of a middle-class, Roman Catholic couple, Charles and Josephine Campbell.

After earning his Masters degree in Arthurian studies from Columbia University he was awarded a travelling fellowship and continued his studies in France and Germany. It was during this period in Europe that Joe was first exposed to those modernist masters -notably, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters would eventually lead him to theorize that artists are a culture's mythmakers, and that mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind's universal need to explain psychological, social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.

In 1934, he was offered and accepted a position in the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he would retain for thirty-eight years.

His many publications notwithstanding, it was arguably as a public speaker that Joe had his greatest popular impact. From the time of his first public lecture in 1940, it was apparent that he was an erudite but accessible lecturer, a gifted storyteller, and a witty raconteur. In the ensuing years, he was asked more and more often to speak at different venues on various topics. These talks drew an ever-larger, increasingly diverse audience, and soon became a regular event.

Although Joe retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence in 1972 to devote himself to his writing, he continued to undertake two month-long lecture tours each year and in 1985, Joe was awarded the National Arts Club Gold Medal of Honour in Literature.

Joseph Campbell, aged 83, died unexpectedly in 1987 after a brief struggle with cancer. In 1991, Joseph's widow Jean Erdman, and his editor Robert Walter, created the Joseph Campbell Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserve, protect and perpetuate Joseph.s work.