Joseph Campbell's Reading List

Read what his students read!

The Condensed Version

Appendix 2 to The Mythic Dimension "comprises a master reading list for Campbell's famous Introduction to Mythology class, which he taught at Sarah Lawrence College from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. This reading list gives a sense of the material covered in this class, but also an insight into the authors and books that most influenced Campbell in his own thinking..."

"Eighty to eighty-give percent of these titles appeared each year as part of his course reading list..."

[I have removed most of the publication information, except for translators', and sometimes editors', names. Many of the editions listed were published AFTER Campbell's death, so it's unlikely he favored them! The order is... random.]

• Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.
• Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. One-volume ed. Also, abridged from the second and third editions, ed. Robert Frazer.
• Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields.
• Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think. Trans. Lilian A. Clare.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey.
• —. Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex. Trans. A. A. Brill.
• —. Totem and Taboo. Trans. A. A. Brill.
• —. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine A. Jones.
• Jung, Carl Gustav. Integration of the Personality. Trans. Stanley M. Dell.
• The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. Translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with a foreword and commentary by C. G. Jung.
• The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or, The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane: according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English renderings. Compiled and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz.
• Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Dance of Shiva.
• The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. W. J. Johnson.
• Okakuru, Kazuko. The Book of Tea.
• Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen.
• Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. Trans. R. F. C. Hull.
• Lao-Tze, The Canon of Reason and Virtue (Tao Te Ching). Chinese and English. Trans. D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus.
• Sun-Tzu, The Art of War. Trans. Thomas Cleary.
• Confucius, Analects. Trans. and annotated by Arthur Waley.
• —. The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot. Trans. Ezra Pound. New York, 1951.
• Chiera, Edward, They Wrote in Clay; The Babylonian Tablets Speak Today. Ed. George G. Cameron.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.
• Bible, New Testament, Book of Luke
• Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. James Scully and C. J. Herrington.
• Euripides. Hyppolytus. Trans. Richard Lattimore, In Four Tragedies.
• —. Alcestis. Trans. William Arrowsmith.
• Sophocles. Oediups Tyrannus. Trans. and ed. by Luci Berkowitz & Theodore F. Brunner.
• Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns.
• —. Symposium. Trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato.
• The Koran. Trans. N. J. Dawood.
• The Portable Arabian Nights. Ed. Joseph Campbell.
• Beowulf. Trans. Lucien Dean Pearson. Ed. Rowland L. Collins.
• Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. Trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur.
• Poetic Edda. Trans. Henry Adams Bellows.
• The Mabinogion. Trans. Jeffrey Gantz.
• Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm's Fairy Tales. [Padraic Colum?]
• Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
• Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture.
• Mann, Thomas. "Tonio Krøger," trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, in Stories of Three Decades.
• Thompson, Stith. Tales of the North American Indians.
• Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians.
• Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture.
• Stimson, John. E. Legends of Maui and Tahaki.
• Melville, Herman. Typee.
• Frobenius, Leo, and Douglas C. Fox. African Genesis.
• Radin, Paul. African Folktales and Sculpture. 2nd ed., rev., with additions.
• Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.

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