Campbell, Joseph
Campbell, Joseph( 1904–87),born in New York City, was six years old when his mythic and anthropological interests were awakened by a visit to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden. He graduated from Columbia College in 1925, and after another year to complete a Master's thesis on Arthurian Romance, won a traveling fellowship to Europe, where he spent the next several years, mostly in Munich and Paris, studying medieval philology, Sanskrit, and mythology; he was drawn to the theories of Carl Jung, especially that of a “collective unconscious,” a deep racial reservoir common to everyone, out of which rise the universal symbols of the world's mythologies. In 1934 Campbell began teaching comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College, continuing there for 38 years. Gleanings from his lectures resulted in his most influential work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), showing the universality of the quest motif....
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