The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This book has been in print continuously since its publication in 1949. It has been published into more than twenty languages and has sold well over a million copies, making it one of the most popular academic books ever published.

Part of its popularity is that, while it is scholarly in its exploration of its subject, The Hero with a Thousand Faces is universal in its appeal. It is looking at the basis for stories, a subject that fascinates many people.

Part of its popularity, too, has been that it has been used by creative artists of many kinds — novelists, film-makers, composers, songwriters, painters, video game designers, rollercoaster designers and many more — as a blueprint to leading an audience through a profound, transformative experience. As Campbell said, artists are the modern mythmakers, and since the publication of this book, they have used Campbell’s masterpiece to learn not only how to read a myth, but how to create one.

The most famous use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a road map was by American film director George Lucas when he created the Star Wars films:

I wrote many drafts of this work and then I stumbled across The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It was the first time that I really began to focus. Once I read that book I said to myself, “This is what I’ve been doing. This is it.” […] The Hero with a Thousand Faces was the first time a book began to focus what I had already been doing intuitively.^[7]

And so, as you read this book, consider: Joseph Campbell explores in these pages ancient myths from around the globe, and yet his point is that the myths live everywhere there is a human imagination to give them life. As he puts it,

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue,^[8] waiting for the traffic light to change.^[9]

David Kudler

Managing Editor

The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

Mill Valley, California

September 28, 2020

ENDNOTES

[1] Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (San Anselmo, California: Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2010), "The Impact of Science on Myth ."

[2] The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, (San Anselmo, California: Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2018), "The Return Threshold."

[3] Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, "The Vision Quest."

[4] Bullfinch’s Mythology is a well-known English collection of Greek, Roman, and medieval European legends, published by Thomas Bulfinch in London, England, 1867.

[5] Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, "The Boon."

[6] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2020), "Prologue."

[7] George Lucas, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, "The Return Threshold."

[8] The street corner that Campbell describes here is just outside of one of his favorite buildings, the New York Public Library in the center of New York City.

[9] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, "Prologue."

Notes about the Text

In 1949, when this book was originally published, all of the notes to the text were placed at the bottom of each page as footnotes. Campbell used these notes for a variety of purposes:

To provide a quick, parenthetical comment

To give a full source citation or discuss the source material itself

To refer, hypertextually, to earlier or later passages within the book

Occasionally, to provide an extended discussion of a related topic somewhat secondary to his primary argument, which occasionally led to notes that spilled over several pages

There was no distinction among these different kinds of notes in earlier editions of this work.

As we prepared the third edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 2008, we made the choice to handle these different types of notes with distinct styles, to make it easier for the reader to use and appreciate them as Campbell intended.

The short parenthetical comments we retained as footnotes. In this ebook edition, those are designated with an asterisk.*

The citations we moved to the end of the book as endnotes. In this edition, endnotes are designated with a number set in square brackets.^[1] In addition, we updated many of the citations to more current editions of the books to which Campbelll was referring and added citations in the those cases where Campbell had not provided a source. (For a full rundown on the sources for this book, see Richard Buchan's excellent Annotated Bibliography.)