SOURCE: Larsen, Stephen, and Robin Larsen. “The Hero (1945-49).” In A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell, pp. 327-46. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

In the following essay, Larsen and Larsen chronicle the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The miracle is, that the magic is effective in the tiniest, nursery fairytale: as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a single droplet; or as the full mystery of the teeming life of the earth is contained within the egg of a flea. For myth is not manufactured; rather, it is a spontaneous production of the living psyche; it bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

—Joseph Campbell, early draft of The Hero with a Thousand Faces

During the early 1940s, as darkness afflicted the whole world, the Mellons' heroic young venture, the Bollingen Foundation, came...