Pilgrim's Progress

Allegory by John Bunyan, published in 1678–84, that describes the journey through life to the Celestial City of a man called Christian. On his way through the Slough of Despond, the House Beautiful, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and other landmarks, he meets a number of allegorical figures.

This work was often the only other book an American pioneer family owned and read, besides the Bible.

In The Pilgrim's Progress the worlds of biblical and English rural culture are successfully fused; the simple plot has taken on the quality of a myth, and the symbols have become a continuing part of the language. For a long time the book was read by ordinary people as a devotional manual and was often, with the Authorized Version of the Bible, the only book in the household; in the literary world its quality was recognized only by a few. Opinion began to change with Southey's preface to his 1830 edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, and references to it permeate 19th-century fiction; its influence, for example, lies behind works as diverse as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Louisa Alcott's Little Women, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.