Sources #4: Modern Literature

Joseph Campbell was, after all, a literature professor.

He read modern literature with as much passion as he researched medieval materials (described previously). In fact, the next book he wrote (after the commentary on Where the Two Came to Their Father) was
a commentary on Joyce's very difficult Finnegans Wake, which he co-authored with Henry Morton Robinson. (At this time, he also wrote the commentary for a volume of Grimm's Fairy Tales.)

And his first major "solo work," The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was a triumph of literary analysis.

Meanwhile, he was reading (and, after 1934, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College) the work of modern masters like Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and Goethe, in addition to Joyce, and the then-modern psychologists Freud and Jung, both of whom looked deeply into literature, ancient and modern.

Long ago, he wrote down a reading list. It has been published in various formats, both in print (in the back of The Mythic Dimension) and on the net. I have posted a copy here for download.

Next time: Art and Creativity