The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was a pre-eminent American scholar of literature and comparative mythology.

Two things about his study of myth are worth noting. First, where many of his colleagues focused on the specifics of a particular culture’s myths, exploring what made that society’s foundational stories unique, Campbell was fascinated with the ways in which all myths told what he called “the one great story of mankind.”

The other interesting thing about Campbell’s approach to mythology was that he was very focused on the humanist part of the religious equation, rather than the theological. While he studied, wrote, and lectured on humanity’s metaphysical traditions for over sixty years, Campbell’s focus was not on the question “What is out there?” but rather on the question, “Why do we tell the stories that we do about whatever it is that is out there?”

As a young man, he studied for a doctorate in medieval literature at New York’s prestigious Columbia University. His studies focused on the tales of England’s King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which were largely written in Old French and Old German, and so he applied to study at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in France, where he arrived in 1927.

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