The Pilgrim's Progress

Cultural  

1. (1678, 1684) A religious allegory by the seventeenth-century English author John Bunyan. Christian, the central character, journeys from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Along the way he faces many obstacles, including the Slough of Despond. He is eventually successful in his journey, and is allowed into heaven.

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Example Sentences

The low opinion in which allegory is now widely held can be blamed on The Pilgrim’s Progress.

From Slate • May 3, 2016

The most famous allegory ever written, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, was published in 1678, making it a holdover; allegory saw its artistic heyday in the Middle Ages.

From Slate • May 3, 2016

Certainly it is odd not to have The Pilgrim's Progress but to have a novel whose title is derived from it – Vanity Fair.

From The Guardian • May 24, 2012

This motif, sounding like an ecstatic awakening, obsessed him: he used it in The Pilgrim's Progress to denote the Christian pilgrim arriving at his goal, the Celestial City.

From The Guardian • Jun. 11, 2010

His stock of books was small, but they were the right kind—the Bible, "The Pilgrim's Progress," Æsop's Fables, "Robinson Crusoe," a history of the United States, and the Statutes of Indiana.

From The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln by Whipple, Wayne