All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Since its publication in 1949, Joseph Campbell’s seminal work on the archetypal heroes and myths shared by world religions and traditions has focused countless artists and academics on our cultural commonalities rather than our differences. Legend has it that George Lucas used Campbell’s book as a foundation for his Star Wars trilogy. Harry Potter also closely hews to the classic hero’s journey that Campbell drew from ancient allegories in dozens of cultures and codified into one rollicking human epic, a universal saga that he referred to as the monomyth and that, he argued, sits deep in our subconscious, woven into all our rituals, from marriage to burial. A prolific author and editor, he believed that people need these superhuman figures because they are “the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.” But in a wistful last chapter, he noted that modernity has devalued this collective consciousness in favor of self-expression and a fragmented culture tilted toward science and economics. In his view, we are enriched and supported when we embrace the “oneness of the individual and the group.” Today that bond is frayed. “The lines of communication between the conscious and unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut,” Campbell wrote, “and we have been split in two.”

Next: The Fatal Shore