As a writer on largely violent matters people rarely ask me about literary influences. Here are my top five:

1. Robert E. Howard

2. J. B. Bury

3. Will Durant

4. Gene Wolfe

5. Joseph Campbell.

I have read Campbell's:

Power of Myth

Transformations of Myth Through Time

Hero With a Thousand Faces

Encyclopedia of World Mythology

Flight of the Wild Gander

Below is an article that attempts to place him in terms of his morality—which we would call politics, since our morality is exclusively tied up in power and consumption—and does a nice job of putting him in context and linking him to other counter-culture thinkers of his time.

Interestingly, Campbell was an early victim of SJW attacks, specifically from a Jewish assistant of his, who was aghast at his not wanting to delve further into her faith and then conducted a smear campaign in which his vehement opposition to any notion of a spiritually chosen people was interpreted as anti-Semitism. It is only fitting that people on the political right looking to reassemble the scraps of culture left to us after the 20th Century should adopt him as a beacon of tolerance.

Another aspect of Campbell's work was that he decoded masculine rituals from mythic systems of knowledge and went a long way toward convincing men in my age group [late Baby Boomers and early Gen-Xers] that we had to address the metaphysics of finding our balls if we were going to go to our grave as anything more than the good slaves our fathers were.

"Joseph Campbell, the famed teacher of comparative mythology, was born on this day in 1904. For many people, including yours truly, he has served as a “gateway drug” into not only a new way of looking at myths, but into a non-materialistic way of viewing the world. And although as a public figure, Campbell mostly remained apolitical, evidence from his private life indicates that he was at least nominally a “man of the Right.”

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