By now, almost everyone likely to read this book knows that the ideas Joseph Campbell, the great late thinker, teacher and writer on the subject of comparative mythology, profoundly influenced George Lucas and provided the ideological background of Star Wars; so much so, in fact, that many younger readers of Campbell have been brought to his work by the route of Tatooine and Coruscant rather than the other way round. Lucas is one of the Emeritus Associates of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and member of the Founding Board of Advisors.

Joseph John Campbell was born in 1904 in White Plains, NY, into a middle-class, Roman Catholic family (much as Lucas was born into a middle class Methodist family). When he was seven years old, his father took him to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was a life-defining experience for the boy. In his own words, Campbell “became fascinated, seized, obsessed, by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes.” While remaining a practising Catholic, Campbell became obsessed with the culture of “Indians” and was, at the age of ten, reading the Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, having had previously read everything else he could find on the subject of Native Americans. The tension between the two mythological perspectives arguably shaped his thinking for the rest of his life: as he could not or indeed would not quite forego either one or the other, he made it his mission to find and map the ancient common ground where the twain would meet.

Following a serious respiratory illness (and Lucas was a sickly child, too) in his thirteenth year and, at the age of fifteen, the harrowing experience of losing his grandmother and his family’s entire possessions in a fire which completely consumed his childhood home, Campbell graduated in 1921 from a Catholic residential school in Connecticut. He went on to study medieval literature at Columbia University. Affable and physically active, he played in a jazz band (like Lucas) and was an excellent runner. While still at the university, he visited Europe with his parents. On board the steamer, he met a young man who was to become his lifelong friend and somewhat of a spiritual guide: Jiddu Krishnamurti, a Brahmin Hindu who was being raised by the Theosophical Society at Adyar, India, as the next avatar of the World Teacher. After achieving his BA in 1925 and an MA for his studies of Arthurian literature in 1927, Campbell won a Proudfit Travelling Fellowship which enabled him to continue his studies at the University of Paris (1927-1928) and Munich (1928-1929).

During this second stay in Europe, Campbell was able to have first-hand experience of her modern artists: among others Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, James Joyce and Thomas Mann. He became familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung whom, at a later stage, he visited at the great man’s home in Ascona, Switzerland. The modernist experience – the modernist theme park, as it were – struck a deep resonance within his own thinking and formed the basis of his theory of creative mythology, whereby artists (understood in the European sense of not only painters and sculptors but also poets, writers, musicians and so on) were the mythmakers of today.

Upon his return from Europe in 1929, he found himself at a loose end, unable to continue building his career because of the Great Depression. In 1931, after the fashion among the young men of the day, he decided to journey across the United States, hoping to experience “the soul of America” and discover what his task in life might be. Following three years of search, trial and error, he finally secured a post in the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College which he then kept for thirty eight years. In 1938 he married one of his students, Jean Erdman, who later became a dancer and choreographer of renown.

In 1940, Campbell assisted Swami Nikhilananda in producing a new translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (published 1942). Through work with Nikhilananda, he met the indologist Heinrich Zimmer, whom he henceforth regarded as his mentor and, alongside C G Jung, the dominant influence in his life and work. Zimmer provided an introduction to the Bollingen Foundation, an organisation with a mission to foster “scholarship and research in the liberal arts and sciences and other fields of cultural endeavour”. Over the years Campbell contributed to a number of publications in their ambitious project, The Bollingen Series, overseeing, among other things, the posthumous publication of Zimmer’s unfinished works. He also co-authored the first study of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, 1944).

His first major independent work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII: 1949), brought him the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contributions to Creative Literature. It was a study of the structure of heroic myths found in every culture on earth, the structure Campbell chose to term Monomyth, borrowing the word from James Joyce. The book became hugely influential in the next few decades and remains so today, perhaps more than ever before. His other works include:

• The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Vol. 1: 1959)
• Oriental Mythology (Vol. 2: 1962)
• Occidental Mythology (Vol. 3: 1964)
• Creative Mythology (Vol. 4: 1968)
• The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension (1969)
• 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 (1983-1987, unfinished)
• The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers, transcribed and edited from 24 hours of interview filmed in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and in 1987 at the Museum of Natural History, New York; first presented as a TV-series and published posthumously in 1988)

Over the years, even after giving up his regular teaching post in order to devote himself completely to writing, Campbell continued to lecture on various occasions and at various venues, drawing large crowds and gaining considerable fame as people’s intellectual. The popular culture picked up on his call to “follow your bliss” and spread it enthusiastically on T-shirts and by other means (google that phrase and see what happens).

Campbell died in 1987, having had followed his bliss consistently and with integrity. Like Lucas, he never let life distract him too much from his work.