Joseph Campbell

American writer and leading authority and lecturer on mythology, the psyche and symbolism.

Campbell was the son of a hosiery importer and wholesaler. He had a childhood fascination with "Buffalo Bills Wild West Show", which performed annually at the old Madison Square Garden, with cowboys and sharpshooters. He made many trips with his brother Charles, and sister, Alice, to the American museum of Natural History, which enhanced his interest in the Indian culture. When he was nine years old, he invaded the public library next door to his home, and read all the books about Indians within a year.

Already a "good little anthropologist" as a preparatory student at the Canterbury school in New Milford, he devoured pioneering studies on the pacific people. By the time he entered Dartmouth College, Campbell was ahead of his classmates. He transferred after one year to Columbia University, where he changed his major of Biology to Literature.

Upon completing his BA studies in 1925, he received his MA in 1929 for his Masters thesis. He won a traveling Proudfit fellowship, for the strength of his thesis, to go to the University of Paris in 1927, where he studied Old French and Provencal. Campbell attended the University of Munich in 1928, but returned to New York in 1929. He was greeted by the Wall Street financial debacle two weeks after arriving in the U.S., having a season of unemployment.

For the next five years, he traveled between Woodstock in New York and California. In Carmel, he met John Steinbeck and his wife Carol, settling down with them for awhile. He later sailed up the Alaskan coast with biologist Ed Ricketts, then he taught at his alma mater, the Canterbury school, in 1932-33. He next accepted an offer to teach at the literature department of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in 1934, where he stayed as a faculty member until 1972.

Campbell became a close friend of German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, at Columbia.