Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell was an American writer on comparative mythology and comparative religion who taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College for decades before becoming, improbably, a popular figure. His The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) proposed that the world’s myths share one underlying adventure — the idea later shorthanded as the hero’s journey — and it has been reshaping novels and films ever since. He died in 1987; the Bill Moyers interviews that made him a household name were broadcast and published the following year, and much of the Campbell now quoted online comes from that late, spoken, posthumously edited body of work — part of why so many “Campbell quotes” are so hard to pin to a page.