Pilgrim's Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of a man named Christian pursuing his pilgrimage through Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond and the Delectable Mountains on his path towards the Celestial City and is one of the world’s most famous religious allegories. John Bunyan wrote the first part of his tract while in prison for his religious beliefs, and it remains a supreme classic of the seventeenth-century English Puritan tradition. Yet he also created a profound folk-epic of the universal imagination, one that has had an immeasurable influence on the writing that followed it ever since. Bunyan wrote the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress when he was in prison for conducting unauthorised Baptist religious services outside of the Church of England. It was published in 1678; the second part was published in 1684. In Bunyan's hands a pious tract is transformed into a work of imaginative literature whose influence, both indirectly on the English consiousness and directly on the literature that followed, has been immeasurable. The rich countryman's phrases that Bunyan borrowed or invented have become enshrined in the language, and many of the characters he created to people his imaginary world have won for themselves an independent and unforgettable existence.