SOURCE: Manganaro, Marc. “Joseph Campbell: Authority's Thousand Faces.” In Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell, pp. 151-85. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Manganaro explores Campbell's approach to and use of mythology, and discusses the appeal of his work.

Reading Modernism, Reading Myth

Like Frazer, Joseph Campbell has achieved great popularity as a reader of comparative cultures. Campbell's corpus, like Frazer's Golden Bough, has made the difficult transition from a modest scholarly readership to a massive popular audience. By July 1989, the posthumously published version of The Power of Myth, the book fashioned from Bill Moyers's interviews with Campbell airing on Public Broadcasting, had remained on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for fifty-seven weeks. The forty-year-old Hero with a Thousand Faces also made the list that year. The famous account of the policeman reporting to...