The pilgrim's progress

Biographie de John Bunyan

JOHN BUNYAN (1628-88) was born at Elstow, near Bedford, the eldest son of a brazier. He learned to read and write at the village school, and prepared to follow his father's trade. In 1644, however, he was swept up in the Civil War, and served as a soldier in the Parliamentary army. After leaving the army in 1647, he underwent a prolonged and agonizing spiritual crisis. Following his religious conversion he joined an Independent church in Bedford, and before long began to preach. This led, in 1656, to the beginning of a literary career in the course of which he would publish some sixty works of controversial, expository, and practical divinity, marked by an uncompromising zeal and trenchant directness of style. In 166o, following the Restoration of Charles II, he was imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford gaol because of his refusal to stop preaching. While in prison he published several books, among them Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), now recognized as one of the classics of Puritan spiritual autobiography. It was not, however, until the publication in 1678 of The Pilgrim s Progress that his genius fully declared itself The imaginative intensity and authenticity of his allegory of the Christian life made the book an extraordinary best-seller, and bas earned Bunyan a unique place in literary history. It was followed in 168o by its sequel, The Life and Death of Mr Badman, by the elaborate multi-level allegory The Holy War in 1682, and by Part Two of The Pilgrim's Progress in 1684, works which substantiate Bunyan's claim to be among the founders of the English novel. W. R. OWENS is Professor of English Literature at the Open University. His publications include two volumes in the Oxford edition of The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan (1994) and a co-edited collection of essays, John Bunyan and his England, 1628-88 (1990). He is co-author, with P. N. Furbank, of The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-Attributions (1994), and A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). They are joint General Editors of The Works of Daniel Defoe (44 vols., in progress).