Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)
Filed under the name Joseph · September 24, 2026
Joseph Campbell spent his career studying mythology and figured out that stories across wildly different cultures kept following the same deep patterns — the 'hero's journey,' as it's known now — and that idea ended up influencing everybody from novelists to filmmakers, most famously George Lucas when he was building 'Star Wars.' I'm not a scholar and I've never read Campbell's actual books, but I've watched enough movies with my grandkids to recognize the shape he's talking about, the ordinary guy who gets called out of his regular life and has to become something more through hard trial. That's not a bad description of plenty of lives I've known personally, including some of the union guys I worked alongside for 34 years, who never got a movie made about them but went through their own version of that same journey. Campbell put a name on something true about how people actually grow. That's real intellectual work, even if it doesn't look like it from a mill floor.