The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey — summary

The boy who saw a face on a nickel

In 1910, a six-year-old boy named Joseph Campbell stood with his father in the sideshow tent of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in profile on a small platform was a Sioux warrior named Irontail. He sat in profile because his face had just appeared on the brand-new five-cent coin, and people were lining up to compare the man with the nickel. The boy looked at Irontail. Then he looked at the coin. Something inside him quietly tipped over.

By the time he was eleven, Joe Campbell had read every book about American Indians in the children's section of the New Rochelle public library, and the librarians let him into the adult stacks. By thirteen, in his own slightly cocky words, he knew more about Indian life than most of the anthropologists he would meet decades later. He never planned this. Nobody assigned it. He simply followed the pull of one face he could not stop thinking about, and the pull turned into a life. Half a century later, he would call this the call to adventure, and argue that every meaningful life starts the same way: with a small, stubborn fascination that almost nobody around you takes seriously.

That is the seed of *The Hero's Journey*, the 1990 book edited by Phil Cousineau from a long string of recorded conversations with Campbell at Esalen Institute. It is not a textbook. It is an old man, near the end of his life, walking back through everything he learned and asking what really matters. The book answers three questions for the reader: where does a meaningful life come from, why do all the great myths sound strangely similar, and what do you do when the religion or the career path you inherited has stopped speaking to you. The answers turn out to be surprisingly practical.