American · b. 1904
Joseph Campbell was an American scholar of comparative mythology, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, whose concept of the 'hero's journey' profoundly influenced literature, film, and psychology.
Joseph Campbell devoted his career to the comparative study of myth, drawing on cultures around the world to identify the deep patterns that recur in humanity’s stories.
His landmark The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) set out the “monomyth,” or hero’s journey, a universal narrative pattern that has shaped storytellers from George Lucas to countless novelists and screenwriters. His multi-volume The Masks of God and the popular television conversations The Power of Myth brought his ideas to a wide audience.
Campbell is celebrated for revealing the enduring power and unity of myth, and for ideas that continue to influence storytelling, psychology, and the search for meaning.
by Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell's hugely influential study of comparative mythology. Drawing on myths from across cultures, he argues that they share a single underlying structure — the 'monomyth' or Hero's Journey — and explores its psychological meaning, in a book that has shaped storytelling for generations.
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