Joseph Campbell

Across much of the twentieth century, Joseph John Campbell made a life out of reading old stories as if they still had work to do. Born in White Plains, New York, on March 26, 1904, and raised in an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family, he became an American writer and a professor of literature whose subject was larger than any one classroom: comparative mythology, comparative religion, and the patterns of human experience. His family history reached back to County Mayo in Ireland through his paternal grandfather, and his childhood included a move to New Rochelle, New York. In 1919, a fire destroyed the family home there, killing his maternal grandmother and injuring his father, who had tried to save her.

Campbell’s education first pointed in several directions before it settled into the humanities. After graduating from the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, in 1921, he studied biology and mathematics at Dartmouth College, then 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. He was also an accomplished athlete, winning awards in track and field and, for a time, ranking among the fastest half-mile runners in the world. A 1924 trip to Europe helped redirect his mind: on the return voyage he met Jiddu Krishnamurti, the messiah-elect of the Theosophical Society, and their discussion of Indian philosophy sparked Campbell’s interest in Hindu and Indian thought.

With a Columbia fellowship, Campbell studied in Europe, taking up Old French, Provençal, and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and learning to read and speak French and German. When he returned to Columbia in 1929, he wanted to add Sanskrit and modern art to medieval literature, but without faculty approval he withdrew from graduate study. The Great Depression then gave him an unusual education of his own making. From 1929 to 1934, he lived in a rented shack in Woodstock, New York, and read intensely, later recalling that he divided the day into four three-hour periods, using three of them for reading, nine hours a day, for five years.

Those years also took him west. In 1931 and 1932, Campbell lived in California, continued his independent studies, and became close to John Steinbeck and Steinbeck’s wife, Carol. On the Monterey Peninsula, he was drawn into the circle of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Campbell lived for a time next door to Ricketts, joined in his professional and social activities, and accompanied him on a 1932 trip to Juneau, Alaska, aboard the Grampus. He began a novel centered on Ricketts as a hero, though he did not complete it, and in 1933, while teaching at the Canterbury School, he sold his first short story, “Strictly Platonic,” to Liberty magazine.

In 1934, Campbell accepted a post as professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. Four years later he married Jean Erdman, a dancer-choreographer and one of his former students; for most of their 49-year marriage they shared a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village, later also keeping an apartment in Honolulu. He taught at Sarah Lawrence for 38 years, retiring in 1972. Along the way, he formed a friendship with the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and, after Zimmer’s death, spent the next decade editing and publishing Zimmer’s papers. In 1955 and 1956, Campbell took a sabbatical and traveled for the first time to Asia, spending six months mostly in India and six months mostly in Japan, an experience that shaped his thinking about Asian religion and myth and about teaching comparative mythology beyond an academic audience.

Campbell is best known for The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, where he set out his theory of the archetypal hero shared across world mythologies, a pattern he called the monomyth. After the book appeared, his ideas were taken up by many modern writers and artists, and he gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell’s work as an influence on the Star Wars saga. Campbell died on October 30, 1987, but his words still carry because they make ancient stories feel close to ordinary decisions about work, desire, fear, and purpose. His often repeated phrase, “Follow your bliss,” remains direct, memorable, and hard to dismiss.