What 1933 book by C.S. Lewis retells a journey through a fictionalized version of modern intellectual history?

The Pilgrim's Regress is C.S. Lewis’s 1933 allegorical book about a journey through a fictionalized version of modern intellectual history.

The title echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s work is not a direct sequel. Its protagonist, John, leaves his home in search of an island and encounters figures and landscapes representing competing philosophies, ideologies, and approaches to religion.

Lewis wrote the book soon after his return to Christian belief. Its subtitle, An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals the intellectual concerns behind the story. The book combines adventure, satire, and theological argument rather than presenting a straightforward realist novel.

Some readers confuse The Pilgrim’s Regress with Lewis’s later apologetic works, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. Those books explain Christian ideas more directly, while The Pilgrim’s Regress communicates them through a sustained allegorical narrative.