The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Published 1949 · 432 pages · 134,277 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Anthropology & Folklore, Nonfiction, Psychology, Religion & Spirituality
How hard is The Hero with a Thousand Faces to read?
The Hero with a Thousand Faces scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Mythological and Jungian terminology.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- High-level pattern recognition across cultures.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with mythological references from many traditions.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Thematic organization across cultures.
- Symbolic density: 35 out of 100
- The entire book is about symbols and their meanings.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Earnest, reverential tone toward mythology.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- The monomyth thesis is stated clearly.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Multi-part structure following the hero's journey stages.
How The Hero with a Thousand Faces is regarded
The Hero with a Thousand Faces holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.