Which 1933 C.S. Lewis book presents a fictional pilgrimage modeled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is C.S. Lewis’s 1933 fictional pilgrimage modeled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Published in 1933, the book was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. Its full title, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals its mixture of allegory, religious argument, and intellectual autobiography. The central character, John, travels through a symbolic landscape while seeking the meaning of a mysterious desire.

Lewis wrote the book after his return to Christianity, but he later acknowledged that its symbolism was not always easy for readers to follow. The work contains characters and places representing philosophical positions, cultural movements, and attitudes toward religion. A substantial explanatory preface was added in later editions to clarify some of its references.

The title deliberately recalls Bunyan’s seventeenth-century Christian classic. Lewis’s book is not a sequel; it is a modern response to Bunyan’s pilgrimage structure, shaped by Lewis’s own conversion, reading, and engagement with twentieth-century ideas.