Grump's Grump

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Main article: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Originally titled How to Read a Myth, and based on the introductory class on mythology that he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949 as Campbell's first foray as a solo author; it established his name outside of scholarly circles and remains, arguably, his most influential work to this day. Not only did it introduce the concept of thehero's journey to popular thinking, but it also began to popularize the very idea of comparative mythology itself—the study of the human impulse to create stories and images that, though they are clothed in the motifs of a particular time and place, draw nonetheless on universal, eternal themes. Campbell asserted:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.

This was the first text book Doc. Sexson assigned to me when I took his mythology class as a freshman in 1988.  I still have this book somewhere in my library red cover with a South American gold mask picture.  It funny how somethings stay with you throughout your life.

And yes he is the same today as he was 24 years ago.

I wonder how long I will remember that book.  This is the only time I can't tell you where it is in the library.