BUNYAN, JOHN. - English writer and preacher, b. 28 Nov. 1628 at Elstow near Bedford, d. in London on 31 August 1688. He served for two years in Cromwell's army, absorbing those Puritan-Calvinist doctrines which he did not lay aside even with his adherence to the Baptists. After his marriage he abandoned his dissolute life and was ordained a minister of the Baptist sect. Morality and religion thenceforth constituted the two forces on which he founded his principles of life and thought, principles which he went on preaching even after the Restoration (1660), for which he was arrested and held in prison for more than 12 years. A modest common man (he was a tinsmith), from the Bible and a few other religious books he derived his only literary education.
His major work, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a prose poem destined to become the most widely diffused devotional vade mecum of the English-speaking world, sets forth allegorically the struggles of the soul in search of salvation. Christian, the pilgrim protagonist, on his journey from the city of Destruction to the Celestial City, passes through a series of obstacles, having surmounted which he can contemplate from the peaks of the Delectable Mountains the towers of the longed-for Zion. The narrative unfolds in a style of almost childlike simplicity, with monotonous insistence on details, illuminated at times by touches of representational effectiveness derived from biblical models. The comparison with Dante's Commedia cannot go beyond the outline of a spiritual itinerary common to the two works and their value as a representation of the collective conscience of an entire age. The work allows the Puritan-Calvinist hatred and contempt for the Catholic Church to shine through. More directly autobiographical is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), in which B. shows himself obsessed by the fear of eternal damnation. Interesting for its realistic character is The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680). But almost all of B.'s works, alien as they are to literary pretensions, succeed in communicating to the Anglo-Saxon reader the intimate experiences of this singular writer, so far removed instead from the demands of Mediterranean spirituality.