Joseph Campbell Publishes The Hero with a Thousand Faces

In 1949, mythologist Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces through the Bollingen Foundation. The book presented Campbell's concept of the monomyth, a term borrowed from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, identifying a common narrative pattern — departure, initiation, and return — across mythological traditions worldwide. Campbell, then a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, drew on comparative analysis of myths from cultures spanning Mesopotamia to Polynesia. George Lucas later credited the book's framework as the structural basis for the Star Wars narrative, and Campbell lectured at Skywalker Ranch before his death in 1987.