Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American 🏷️#author and comparative mythologist whose work crossed religious studies, anthropology, and depth psychology to identify shared patterns across the world's mythologies. He is best known for his theory of the monomyth — the recurring narrative structure he called the Hero's Journey — articulated in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Campbell taught comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College for thirty-eight years and produced influential works including The Masks of God (1959-1968), Myths to Live By (1972), and the four-volume Historical Atlas of World Mythology. His ideas reached a much broader audience through the 1988 PBS interview series The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, which became a cultural touchstone and an inspiration for storytellers across film, literature, and game design — most famously George Lucas, who cited the Hero's Journey as a structural blueprint for Star Wars.