Recommendations
Books Like The Pilgrim's Progress
Best books to read after The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Readers who love The Pilgrim's Progress — Bunyan's allegorical journey of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City — will enjoy these works of religious allegory, Puritan spiritual writing, dream-vision literature, and the great tradition of the Christian journey narrative.
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Buy on AmazonThe Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
The foundational Christian allegorical journey — Dante's descent through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is the great medieval precursor to Bunyan's allegorical method; both works use the journey as a vehicle for mapping the spiritual life.
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Buy on AmazonPiers Plowman
by William Langland
The closest English predecessor to The Pilgrim's Progress — Langland's fourteenth-century dream-vision allegory of Will's quest for Truth through a landscape of personified virtues and vices; Bunyan knew and used this tradition.
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Buy on AmazonGrace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
by John Bunyan
Bunyan's own spiritual autobiography — the experiential source for Christian's inner struggles in The Pilgrim's Progress; reading it reveals the Puritan conversion narrative tradition that shaped the allegory.
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Buy on AmazonParadise Lost
by John Milton
The companion masterpiece of Puritan literary culture — Milton's epic retelling of the Fall is written from the same theological world as Bunyan's allegory and shares its concern with the Christian's spiritual condition in a fallen world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Holy War
by John Bunyan
Bunyan's second major allegory, in which the city of Mansoul is besieged by Diabolus and recaptured by Prince Emmanuel — less celebrated than The Pilgrim's Progress but by the same hand and in the same tradition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Way of Perfection
by Teresa of Ávila
The Catholic counterpart in the tradition of the spiritual journey narrative — Teresa's guide to the interior life of prayer is one of the greatest first-person accounts of the soul's progress toward God; complements Bunyan from the contemplative tradition.
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Buy on AmazonLittle Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Alcott structured Little Women explicitly on The Pilgrim's Progress — the March sisters' journey toward moral maturity echoes Christian's journey in Bunyan; the novel opens with the girls reading the Progress and its chapters take their structure from Bunyan's allegory.
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Buy on AmazonThe Pilgrim Hawk
by Glenway Wescott
A twentieth-century prose meditation on the allegory of flight and captivity — Wescott's novella uses the observation of a falcon to meditate on freedom, marriage, and desire; it works as a secular allegory in the Bunyan tradition of deep observation of moral states.
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