What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1933 novel about a pilgrim traveling through a symbolic landscape?

C.S. Lewis’s 1933 symbolic novel about a pilgrim traveling through an allegorical landscape is The Pilgrim’s Regress.

The Pilgrim’s Regress was Lewis’s first published novel. Its full title is The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. The book follows John as he travels through a landscape filled with characters and places representing philosophical, religious, and cultural ideas.

Lewis wrote the novel after returning to Christian belief. It reflects his intellectual concerns during the early 1930s, including the relationship between reason, desire, and faith. The title deliberately recalls John Bunyan’s famous seventeenth-century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s story is not a sequel.

The book can be difficult for modern readers because many of its symbols refer to debates and personalities familiar in Lewis’s own period. It is separate from his later space fiction, including Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.