Which C.S. Lewis book was his first published novel?

The Pilgrim’s Regress was C.S. Lewis’s first published novel.

Published in 1933, the book is an allegorical account of a character named John who leaves his home in search of a distant island. Its title deliberately echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s story is shaped by his own intellectual and spiritual concerns, including reason, desire, ideology, and Christian belief.

Lewis wrote the novel after his return to Christianity, though it is not a simple autobiography. It uses symbolism and conversations to examine the competing philosophies and assumptions he encountered in modern intellectual life. A later edition included a preface in which Lewis explained the book’s background and some of the difficulties readers had found in its allegory.

The novel is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later science fiction and fantasy. Those works became more widely read, but The Pilgrim’s Regress has the distinction of being his first published novel.