What is the name of C.S. Lewis’s Christian allegory published in 1933?

C.S. Lewis’s Christian allegory published in 1933 was The Pilgrim’s Regress. Its subtitle, An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals the book’s mixture of spiritual journey, intellectual argument, and literary symbolism.

The novel follows a character named John as he travels through a landscape filled with figures and places representing ideas, temptations, philosophies, and religious positions. Its title deliberately echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the famous seventeenth-century Christian allegory.

Lewis wrote the book after his conversion to Christianity. It was his first published work of Christian apologetics and appeared several years before his better-known wartime broadcasts and theological books. The allegorical form allowed him to dramatize debates about desire, reason, morality, and faith rather than present them only as abstract arguments.

Readers sometimes confuse this title with The Great Divorce, another imaginative Christian work by Lewis, but The Great Divorce was published in 1945. The Pilgrim’s Regress belongs to Lewis’s early 1930s period.