Joseph Campbell was born in New York City in 1904 and took a conventional path through Dartmouth and Columbia, where he specialized in medieval Arthurian literature. What broke the path open was a period after his coursework, often described as his own version of a hero's retreat, in which he read for years with no syllabus at all: Sanskrit, Jung, Spengler, Frobenius, Boas, and the comparative mythographers of the Victorian era, alongside the modernists Joyce and Mann. He returned from that reading with the cross disciplinary range that would define his career and, in 1934, a teaching post at the newly founded Sarah Lawrence College, where he remained until 1972.
His early scholarly labor was largely custodial: after the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer died in 1943, Campbell edited and published Zimmer's unfinished writings on Indian myth, art and philosophy, immersion that fed directly into his own synthesis. That synthesis appeared in 1949 as The Hero with a Thousand Faces, written while Campbell was also raising a young family on a professor's salary; the book sold modestly for two decades before finding the wide readership that made Campbell, by the time of his death in 1987, one of the most publicly recognized scholars of myth of the twentieth century.