Mythic Imagination by Joseph Campbell

Mythic Imagination by Joseph Campbell

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people's living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase follow your bliss entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. At the age of twenty-nine, after years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone in a jazz combo and read the world's great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story. That tale, included in this collection, remained the famed mythologist's only published piece of fiction, until now.

In these stories, readers will find rich mythological symbolism, down-to-earth concerns with the ravages of the Second World War, and singular iterations of Campbell's famous Hero's Journey schema--all interwoven into a literary style that anticipates the genre that would years later come to be known as magical realism. Compelling in their own right, these seven stories are essential reading for longtime Campbell fans and the many who continue to discover him afresh.

Joseph Campbell was interested in mythology since his childhood in New York, when he read books about American Indians, frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History, and was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Columbia in 1925 and 1927 and went on to study medieval French and Sanskrit at the universities of Paris and Munich. After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 1940s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The many books by Professor Campbell include The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Myths to Live By, The Flight of the Wild Gander, and The Mythic Image. He edited The Portable Arabian Nights, The Portable Jung, and other works. He died in 1987.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781608681532
ISBN 10	160868153X
Title	Mythic Imagination
Author	Joseph Campbell
Series	The Collected Works Of Joseph Campbell
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	New World Library
Year published	2012-11-20
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.