Joseph Campbell: Life and Works

Questions and Answers

New York University

Sarah Lawrence College (correct)

Harvard University

Columbia University

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (correct)

Philosophies of India

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization

Heinrich Zimmer (correct)

Carl Jung

Henry Morton Robinson

Bill Moyers

The Power of Myth Signup and view all the answers

Honolulu Signup and view all the answers

Buffalo Bill's Wild West exhibition and the American Museum of Natural History Signup and view all the answers

Similarities between myths across cultures are central to understanding them. Signup and view all the answers

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Signup and view all the answers

Old French and Sanskrit Signup and view all the answers

He felt a lack of support for his research interests. Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Joseph Campbell was born on March 26, 1904, in New York, New York, U.S.
He was fascinated by artifacts of Native Americans at the American Museum of Natural History.
He saw parallels between Christian beliefs and Native American religious beliefs, leading him to conclude that the similarities could not be coincidental.

Campbell graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in English literature (1925) and an M.A. in medieval literature (1927).
He studied Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich on a two-year fellowship.
He discovered the keys to interpreting myth nonhistorically and nonliterally in the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
He taught at the preparatory school he had attended as a boy (1932-33) and later at Sarah Lawrence College, where he became a professor of literature.

Campbell co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) with Henry Morton Robinson.
He edited four tomes based on Heinrich Zimmer's lecture notes: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), Philosophies of India (1951), and The Art of Indian Asia (1955).
He wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which remains his best-known work.
He tied the meaning of myth to its plot and claimed to have deciphered the common plot of all hero myths.

Campbell retired from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972 and moved to Honolulu with his wife, Jean Erdman.
He became a popular figure on the lecture circuit in the 1970s and '80s.
He was interviewed by Bill Moyers on public television, but died before the interview was first broadcast in 1988.