37 pages • 1 hour read
Blake SnyderSave the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey
Several times in Save the Cat, Snyder refers to Joseph Campbell, a writer and literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College widely known for his work in comparative mythology and religions. Campbell received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1925 and went on to earn a master’s degree in medieval literature in 1927. On a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1950s, Campbell traveled to Asia, largely India and Japan, which informed his thinking about Asian religions and instilled in him a desire to bring comparative mythologies to a wider audience. The work for which he is best known came out in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which explores how many mythological stories around the world share a common narrative structure, or monomyth. Campbell, who was inspired by the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, writes the following of the hero’s journey:
The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula and let it then assist him past his restricting walls (“
