Who is Joseph Campbell from Myths to Live By and what is their importance?

Joseph Campbell gave a series of lectures, delivered without notes and full of eloquent understanding, according to Johnson Fairchild, who wrote the forward to his book, between 1958 and 1971, on the topic of mythology and gathered them all into this book. He has an exhaustive knowledge of the world's religious mythologies, as well as their histories and the anthropological information available about the way men lived and thought before the conception of those religions. He deals even-handedly with each of them, save for a mildly-transparent resentment of the Christian faith in which he was raised, comparing each to the other in its usefulness for affecting wisdom and understanding in the human psyche.