[7] Campbell's approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, especially from academic folklorists.

[13][14] Campbell was raised in an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family; he related that his paternal grandfather Charles had been "a peasant" who came to Boston from County Mayo in Ireland, and became the gardener and caretaker at the Lyman Estate at Waltham, where his son Charles William Campbell grew up and became a successful salesman at a department store prior to establishing his hosiery business.

[22] On his return to Columbia University in 1929, Campbell expressed a desire to pursue the study of Sanskrit and modern art in addition to medieval literature.

"[26] Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–1932), continuing his independent studies and becoming a close friend of the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol.

[29] Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor's, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus.

Campbell, the great chronicler of the "hero's journey" in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts's unpublished philosophical essays.

[32]Campbell continued his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School in Connecticut, during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction.

This year had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and also on the necessity for teaching comparative mythology to a larger, non-academic audience.

Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings, as well as to the art of Pablo Picasso.

In his book The Mythic Image, Campbell quotes Jung's statement about the Bardo Thodol, that it belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life ... For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.

The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation.

[45] Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung's theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms such as anima, animus and ego consciousness.

The Hero's Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.

As this story spread through space and evolved through time, it was broken down into various local forms (masks), depending on the social structures and environmental pressures that existed for the culture that interpreted it.

Lucas stated, following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's.

[57] Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the authorized biography of Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind: I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is... around the period of this realization… it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...

[58] In 1984, Campbell gave a lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, with Lucas in the audience, who was introduced through their mutual friend Barbara McClintock.

In his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero's Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for the contemporary viewer.

Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, created a seven-page company memo based on Campbell's work, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces,[62] which led to the development of Disney's 1994 film The Lion King.

[65] After the explosion of popularity brought on by the Star Wars films and The Power of Myth, creative artists in many media recognized the potential to use Campbell's theories to try to unlock human responses to narrative patterns.

Novelists,[66] songwriters,[67][68] video game designers[69] have studied Campbell's work in order to better understand mythology – in particular, the monomyth – and its impact.

[71] Dan Brown mentioned in a New York Times interview that Joseph Campbell's works, particularly The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, inspired him to create the character of Robert Langdon.

To illustrate his point, Toelken employs Clarissa Pinkola Estés's (1992) Women Who Run with the Wolves, citing its inaccurate representation of the folklore record, and Campbell's "monomyth" approach as another.

Toelken traces the influence of Campbell's monomyth theory into other then-contemporary popular works, such as Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which he says suffers from similar source selection bias.

[78] Ellwood observes that The Masks of God series "impressed literate laity more than specialists"; he quotes Stephen P. Dunn as remarking that in Occidental Mythology Campbell "writes in a curiously archaic style – full of rhetorical questions, exclamations of wonder and delight, and expostulations directed at the reader, or perhaps at the author's other self – which is charming about a third of the time and rather annoying the rest."

He would use this tale through the rest of his career to illustrate both the universal symbols and structures of human myths and the particulars ("folk ideas") of Native American stories.

[88] In many of his later stories (published in the posthumous collection Mythic Imagination) he began to explore the mythological themes that he was discussing in his Sarah Lawrence classes.

Originally titled How to Read a Myth, and based on the introductory class on mythology that he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949 as Campbell's first foray as a solo author; it established his name outside of scholarly circles and remains, arguably, his most influential work to this day.

At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working on a large-format, lavishly illustrated series titled Historical Atlas of World Mythology.

[92] Working with New World Library and Acorn Media UK, as well as publishing audio recordings and ebooks under its own banner, as of 2014[update] the project has produced over seventy-five titles.