Puritan's Progress

John Bunyan is known principally as the author of the famous inspirational allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress. What has carried his fame, however, as much as his art, has been the attraction his work and life have held for the English evangelical tradition. Bunyan was a part of the Puritan movement, which took it for granted that a person would suffer for all things he believed were right. They gave England an ideal of the good man--honest, brave, God-fearing, hard-working and dutiful. Bunyan was a rural tinker when he experienced his "conversion." He became an outspoken traveling Nonconformist preacher who encouraged dissenters against the Stuart effort toward religious uniformity. As an important theorist and spokesman for the rebels, Bunyan was threatened with exile. He chose prison instead, rather than compromise his moral convictions. There, during his long confinement, he wrote numerous tracts and stories, including The Pilgrim's Progress. Here, biographer Monica Furlong examines the major tenets of Puritanism as they were developed and fought for by its chief practitioner and preacher.--From publisher description.