John Bunyan was born in 1628 in Elstow, Bedfordshire, the son of a tinker. He followed his father's trade and served briefly in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War before undergoing, in his mid-twenties, a prolonged and anguishing conversion he would later recount in his spiritual autobiography, *Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners*. He was a man of little formal education who became, by almost any measure, one of the most widely read religious writers in the English language.
His ministry unfolded during one of the more turbulent stretches of English religious history. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Act of Uniformity effectively outlawed preaching outside the established church. Bunyan, who had been ordained by neither bishop nor presbytery, refused to stop preaching and was imprisoned in Bedford County Gaol for twelve years. A second, shorter imprisonment followed in 1676. It was during these years of confinement that he turned to writing, producing works that would otherwise almost certainly never have existed.
The great achievement of those years was *The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come*, published in 1678. Cast as a dream allegory, it follows Christian on his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, through places such as the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. The book draws on scripture, on Bunyan's own experience of doubt and grace, and on the rhythms of ordinary English speech. It is theology made habitable, doctrine rendered as landscape. A second part, following Christian's wife Christiana and their children, appeared in 1684.
Bunyan died in 1688, having outlived the worst of the persecution he had endured. *The Pilgrim's Progress* went on to become, after the Bible, one of the most translated and reprinted books in Christian history, a testimony to what patient suffering and a plain style can produce.