C.S. Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1933.
The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. It appeared in 1933, shortly after his return to Christian belief. The book uses an allegorical journey to explore religious ideas, intellectual arguments, and the experience Lewis called “Joy.”
Its title deliberately recalls John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s book is not a retelling of Bunyan’s story. The central traveler, John, encounters symbolic figures and landscapes representing competing beliefs and desires. Lewis added a subtitle explaining the work’s apologetic purpose.
Readers sometimes place the book later because Lewis’s most famous Christian writings appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. The Screwtape Letters followed in 1942, while Mere Christianity developed from wartime radio broadcasts. The Pilgrim’s Regress belongs to the earlier stage of Lewis’s Christian literary career.