C.S. Lewis’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress was first published in 1933.
The book was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. Its full title, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals its relationship to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress while also describing Lewis’s own intellectual journey.
The protagonist, John, travels through a symbolic landscape while encountering figures and ideas representing philosophical positions, cultural movements, and religious objections. Lewis wrote the book soon after his conversion to Christianity, and its argument reflects his effort to explain why he had returned to Christian belief.
The allegory is more difficult and openly argumentative than the Narnia novels. Lewis later acknowledged that some readers found its symbols hard to follow and added explanatory material to help them. Its 1933 appearance nevertheless established themes that would recur throughout his apologetics: reason, desire, imagination, and the search for meaning.