Which C.S. Lewis book presents an allegorical journey through a world influenced by John Bunyan?

The Pilgrim’s Regress presents C.S. Lewis’s allegorical journey through a world influenced by John Bunyan.

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 connection with Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress while also revealing Lewis’s intellectual concerns.

The protagonist, John, travels through a symbolic landscape while seeking the source of a troubling desire. Along the way, Lewis represents competing philosophies, ideologies, and attitudes toward religion. The story reflects the author’s own movement from atheism toward Christianity, but it is not a straightforward autobiography.

Readers sometimes confuse this book with The Great Divorce, another Lewis allegory involving a journey. The Pilgrim’s Regress is earlier, more explicitly modeled on Bunyan, and focused on the formation of Lewis’s Christian worldview.