What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1933 novel about a man’s journey through a symbolic landscape?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is C.S. Lewis’s 1933 novel about a man’s journey through a symbolic landscape.

The book follows John, who leaves his home after seeing an attractive island and sets out on a pilgrimage. His route becomes an allegorical exploration of ideas, desires, philosophies, and religious questions. Lewis’s title deliberately recalls John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but the work is not a retelling of Bunyan’s narrative.

The Pilgrim’s Regress was Lewis’s first prose fiction published after his conversion to Christianity. Its subtitle, An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals the intellectual concerns behind the adventure. Characters and places embody concepts, making the book more overtly argumentative than Lewis’s later popular fiction.

Readers sometimes confuse this novel with The Great Divorce, another allegorical work by Lewis published in 1945. They also sometimes identify Dymer as the same book; Dymer is a separate narrative poem published in 1926. The Pilgrim’s Regress remains an early and important statement of Lewis’s developing Christian worldview.