Mythic Imagination

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people's living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase "follow your bliss" entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. At the age of twenty-nine, after years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone in a jazz combo and read the world's great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story. That tale, included in this collection, remained the famed mythologist's only published piece of fiction, until now.