By Ethan Maurice | November 19, 2020

Joseph Campbell is one of my greatest heroes. His words ring with deep truth in me and my life has been greatly inspired by his.

What so inspires me about Joe is not that he uncovered and popularized the psychologically powerful, universally mythologized cycle of “the hero’s journey,” but that he did so by walking the hero path himself. His ideas are the foundation upon which our modern myths, movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, were deliberately built. His posthumously released six-part PBS interview series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, remains “one of the most popular series in the history of public television.” The interviews from that series were filled with such deep insight and wisdom that their transcripts were simply printed into one of my all-time favorite books.

As Joseph Campbell’s influence so powerfully poured through our culture, I one day wondered, what particular influences so powerfully poured through him? A few Google searches lead me to the Sarah Lawrence Introduction to Mythology Class Reading List he handed out for thirty-some-odd years, a list not meant to be read in a semester but across a lifetime. Almost unconsciously, I have again and again returned for more reading recommendations. Upon my most recent return I thought, “why haven’t I shared this potent well in which I keep returning to dip?”

So here it is — Joseph Campbell’s recommended reading list — the books that most influenced his influence. Pick one up that stands out, or if you’re wondering why someone would read so many books, grab a copy of The Power of Myth and experience what all that reading amounted to in him.

Joseph Campbell’s Sarah Lawrence Intro to Mythology Class Reading List

• The Metamorphoses of Ovid (Translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

• The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer (One Volume Edition, 1922)

• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim (Translated by Karen E. Fields)

• How Natives Think by Lucien Levy-Bruhl (Translated by Lilian A. Clare)

• The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (Translated by James Strachey)

• Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex by Sigmund Freud (Translated by A.A. Brill)

• Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud (Translated by A.A. Brill)

• Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (Translated by Katherine A. Jones)

• Integration of the Personality by Carl Gustav Jung (Translated by Stanley M. Dell)

• The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life (Translated by Richard Wilhelm)

• The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering

• The Dance of Siva by Ananda Coomaraswamy (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. 1924 Reprint)

• The Bhagavad Gita (Translated by W. J. Johnson)

• The Book of Tea by Kazuko Okakuru

• The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

• Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel (Translated by R. F. C. Hull)

• The Canon of Reason and Virtue (Tao Te Ching) by Lao-Tze (Translated by D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus)

• The Art of War by Sun-Tzu (Translated by Thomas Cleary)

• The Analects by Confucius (Translated by Arthur Waley)

• The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot by Confucius (Translated by Ezra Pound).

• They Wrote in Clay: The Babylonian Tablets Speak by Edward Chiera

• The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Translated by Walter Kaufmann)

• Bible, New Testament (Specifically the Book of Luke)

• Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (Translated by James Scully and C. J.

• Herrington)

• The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides (Specifically Alcestis and Hippolytus, Translated by Richard Lattimore)

• Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles (Translated by Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner)

• The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Specifically Phaedrus and Symposium, Edited by Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns)

• The Koran (Translated by N. J. Dawood)

• The Portable Arabian Nights (Translated by Joseph Campbell and John Payne)

• Beowulf (Translated by Lucien Dean Pearson)

• The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (Translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur)

• Poetic Edda (Translated by Henry Adams Bellows)

• The Mabinogion (Translated by Jeffrey Gantz)

• Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

• Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

• Stories of Three Decades by Thomas Mann (Specifically Tonio Kröger, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter)

• Tales of the North American Indians by Stith Thompson

• Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians by Morris Edward Opler

• Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict

• Legends of Maui and Tahaki by John Stimson (can’t seem to find a copy)

• Typee by Herman Melville

• African Genesis by Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox

• African Folktales and Sculpture by Paul Radin

• Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren

*Joseph Campbell studied Russian just to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the vernacular. Understanding this, I’ve taken great care to find and link his recommended translation of each book above.

**Some of the above links are Amazon affiliate links. If you click a link and buy a book, I will receive a small percentage of its price.