Which 1933 novel by C.S. Lewis follows a pilgrim named John through an allegorical journey?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is C.S. Lewis’s 1933 allegorical novel about a pilgrim named John.

The novel follows John as he travels through a symbolic landscape while seeking the source of a troubling burden. The journey draws on the form of a pilgrimage narrative and reflects Lewis’s developing religious and philosophical concerns. Its full title is The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.

Lewis wrote the book soon after his conversion to Christianity. It was his first published work of prose fiction and was influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, though Lewis’s book addresses modern intellectual movements and ideas of his own era.

The Pilgrim’s Regress is less widely read today than The Chronicles of Narnia or The Screwtape Letters. Readers can also confuse it with The Great Divorce, another allegorical work by Lewis, but that later book is structured as a dreamlike journey from a gray town toward heaven.