Childhood
Joseph Campbell was born and raised in White Plains, New York in an upper middle class Roman Catholic family. As a child, Campbell became fascinated with Native American culture when his father took him to see the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He soon became versed in numerous aspects of Native American society, primarily in its mythology. This led to Campbell's lifelong passion with myth and to his mapping and study of its seemingly cohesive threads among disparate human cultures.


Education
While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University where he received a B.A. in English literature in 1925 and M.A. in Medieval literature in 1927. Campbell was also an accomplished athlete, receiving awards for track and field.


 Europe
In 1927, Campbell received a fellowship provided by Columbia to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French and Sanskrit at the University of Paris in France and the University of Munich in Germany. He quickly learned to read and speak both French and German mastering them after only a few months of rigorous study. He remained fluent in both languages for the rest of his life.

He was highly influenced in Europe by the period of the Lost Generation, a time of enormous intellectual and artistic innovation. Campbell commented on this influence, particularly that of James Joyce, in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:28):

CAMPBELL: And then the fact that James Joyce grabbed me. You know that wonderful living in a realm of significant fantasy, which is Irish, is there in the Arthurian romances; it's in Joyce; and it's in my life.
COUSINEAU: Did you find that you identified with Stephen Daedalus...in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
CAMPBELL: His problem was my problem, exactly...Joyce helped release me into an understanding of the universal sense of these symbols . . . Joyce disengaged himself and left the labyrinth, you might say, of Irish politics and the church to go to Paris, where he became one of the very important members of this marvelous movement that Paris represented in the period when I was there, in the '20s.

It was within this climate that Campbell was also introduced to the work of Thomas Mann who was equally influential upon his life and ideas. While in Europe Campbell was introduced to modern art. He became particularly enthusiastic about the work of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. A whole new world opened up to Campbell while studying in Europe. Here he discovered the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It was also during this time that he met and became friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti, a friendship which began his lifelong interest in Hindu philosophy and mythology. In addition, after the death of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, Campbell was given the task to edit and posthumously publish Zimmer's papers.
 

Return to the United States and the Great Depression
On his return from Europe in 1929, Campbell announced to his faculty at Columbia that his time in Europe had broadened his interests and that he wanted to study Sanskrit and Modern art in addition to Medieval literature. When his advisors did not support this, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate and never returned to a conventional graduate program (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, (1990, first edition:54).

A few weeks later, the Great Depression began. Campbell would spend the next five years (1929-1934) trying to figure out what to do with his life (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:160) and engaging in a period of intensive and rigorous independent study. Campbell discussed this period in The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990, first edition:52-3). Campbell states that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four hour periods, and free one of them...I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."

He also traveled to California for a year (1931-32), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol (Larsen and Larsen, 2002, chapters 8 and 9). Campbell also maintained his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction (Larsen and Larsen, 2002:214) .

Campbell's independent studies lead to greater exploration of the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary and colleague of Sigmund Freud. Campbell edited the first Eranos conference papers and helped to found Princeton University Press' Bollingen Press. Another dissident member of Freud's circle to influence Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868 - 1939). Stekel pioneered the application of Freud's conceptions of dreams, fantasies of the human mind, and the unconscious to such fields as anthropology and literature.


 Sarah Lawrence College
In 1934, Campbell was offered a position as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College (through the efforts of his former Columbia advisor W.W. Laurence). Campbell married one of his former students, Jean Erdman, in 1938 and retired from Sarah Lawrence in 1972.


 Death
Campbell died on October 31, 1987, in Honolulu due to ongoing complications with cancer, shortly after filming The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.

Books

Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial (Jeff King, Joseph Campbell, Maud Oakes) (1943)
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson) (1944)
The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949)
The Flight of the Wild Gander:Explorations in the Mythological Dimension (1951)
The Masks of God; Volume 1, Primitive Mythology (1959)
The Masks of God; Volume 2, Oriental Mythology (1962)
The Masks of God; Volume 3, Occidental Mythology (1964)
The Masks of God; Volume 4, Creative Mythology (1968)
Myths to Live By (1972)
The Mythic Image (1974)
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion (1986)
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume I: The Way of Animal Powers; Part 1 (1988)
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume I: The Way of Animal Powers; Part 2 (1988)
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume II: The Way of the Seeded Earth; Part 1 (1988)
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume II: The Way of the Seeded Earth; Part 2 (1989)
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume II: The Way of the Seeded Earth; Part 3 (1989)
Transformations of Myth Through Time (1990)
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Edited by Diane K. Osbon) (1991)
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce (Edited by Edmund L. Epstein) (1993)
The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays (1959-1987) (Edited by Anthony Van Couvering) (1993)
Baksheesh & Brahman: Indian Journals (1954-1955) (Edited by Robin/Stephen Larsen & Anthony Van Couvering) (1995)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (Edited by Eugene Kennedy) (2001)
Sake & Satori: Asian Journals - Japan (Edited by David Kudler) (2002)
Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (Edited by David Kudler) (2003)
Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (Edited by David Kudler) (2004)