Author(s): Joseph Campbell

Americas History

In these pages, the collected works of Joseph Campbell presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging and brilliant essays exploring myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life. This second volume of Campbell's essays (following "Flight of the Wild Gander") brings together uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987. Written at the height of Campbell's career - and showcasing the lively intelligence that made him the twentieth century's premier writer on mythology - these essays investigate the profound links among myth, the individual, and societies ancient and contemporary.Covering diverse terrain ranging from psychology to the occult, from Thomas Mann to the "Grateful Dead", from Goddess spirituality to Freud and Jung, these playful and erudite writings reveal the threads of myth woven deeply into the fabric of our culture and our lives. 'No one in our century - not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Levi-Strauss - has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness' - James Hillman.
'Campbell has become the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture' - "Newsweek". 'In our generation, the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell' - "Commentary".