John Bunyan

Who Was John Bunyan?

John Bunyan was the greatest allegorist in the English language and one of the most widely read Christian writers in history. Born in Elstow, Bedfordshire, the son of a tinker, he received little formal education and spent his early life in the ordinary rounds of the English working poor. His conversion to Nonconformist Christianity in the early 1650s transformed him into a preacher of remarkable power and into a writer whose work would be read, after the Bible, more widely than any other English text for the next two centuries.

He was imprisoned for preaching without a license in 1660 and spent twelve years in Bedford jail — years he used to write Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), one of the most searching spiritual autobiographies in the language, and to begin The Pilgrim’s Progress. The first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in 1678 and the second in 1684; together they constitute the most influential work of imaginative prose in English after the Bible, translated into more languages and read by more people across more centuries than any comparable work.

The allegory follows Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, through the Slough of Despond, past Vanity Fair, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and across the river of death to the city of God. Its characters — Faithful, Hopeful, Giant Despair, Mr. Worldly Wiseman — have become part of the vocabulary of the English language. Its theology is Calvinist, its imaginative power is universal, and its influence on the English literary tradition is incalculable.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners — 1666
• The Pilgrim's Progress, Part I — 1678
• The Life and Death of Mr. Badman — 1680
• The Holy War — 1682
• The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II — 1684