Joseph campbell foundation sacramento

As you may know, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of serving as the managing editor of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell since 1999. It’s been hard work, but it’s also been very satisfying — in the years that I’ve been at the JCF, we’ve produced fifteen books (closing in on thirty if you include the ebooks), over forty audio recordings and a really wonderful fifteen-hour video series. Of those books I was talking about, seven were brand new, posthumous titles — on three of which I was the titular editor. (You know. The guy on the title with the author.)

Now, the JCF is a not-for-profit, but it hasn’t been run the most such groups are. We’ve tried to the best of our ability to have the work pay our way. We don’t have an office, nor are there any employees — all of the work is done by a handful of independent contractors (like me) and volunteers. We’ve always taken donations, and sometimes we’ve had to be a little more forceful in our appeals due to a cash crunch, but there haven’t been any major donor campaigns, no chasing after grants, no bake sales.  The idea was not to let the tail wag the dog.

There comes a time, however, when a major capital expenditure is bound to come up. In the case of the JCF, we’ve been getting by on a jury-rigged website for about eight years. It’s never been perfect — but at this point, the plaster is falling off the walls. We’ve tried to find low- or no-cost ways to create the kind of vibrant, useful site that our associates need, but finally came to the realization that we needed to raise :gulp: $65,000 in order to make that happen.

So this is where I turn to you — I know that you’re shocked — and ask that you help us continue to fulfill our mission to “preserve, protect, and perpetuate the groundbreaking work of Joseph Campbell.”

Click here to go to our Fundrazr crowdfunding page.

And when you do, remember all of those

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist, author, lecturer, and professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He is best known for his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which introduced the concept of the monomyth, Campbell's theory that the archetypical hero's journey is shared across world mythologies.

Campbell was born in White Plains, New York on March 26, 1905, and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. Campbell graduated from the Canterbury School, in New Milford, Connecticut in 1921, and began classes at Dartmouth College. Two years later, Campbell transferred to Columbia University, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in English Literature in 1925, and a Master's degree in Arthurian Studies in 1927. Campbell spent the following two years studying in Europe at the University of Paris and University of Munich.

Upon returning from Europe, Campbell moved to Woodstock, New York, and began writing short fiction and novels. Between 1931 and 1932, Campbell spent time in California where he befriended John and Carol Steinbeck, and accompanied the marine biologist Ed Ricketts on a trip to Juneau, Alaska. The following year, Campbell took a teaching job at the Canterbury school, while also seeking a full-time position in higher education.

Campbell accepted a job as a Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College in 1934. Four years later he married the dancer and choreographer, Jean Erdman, who was one of his former students. Campbell published his first book in 1943, a collaboration with Maude Oakes and Jeff King entitled, Where the Two Came to Their Father. Campbell was greatly influenced by the writing of both James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and published books on both authors. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) was written with Henry Morton Robinson, and was one of the first major textual analyses of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Campbell published a number of books on comp