13 Facts About Pilgrim's Progress

1.

Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan.

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2.

Early Bunyan scholars such as John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in Bunyan's second, shorter imprisonment for six months in 1675, but more recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock believe that it was begun during Bunyan's initial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672 right after he had written his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

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3.

Pilgrim's Progress meets Evangelist as he is walking out in the fields, who directs him to the "Wicket Gate" for deliverance.

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4.

Pilgrim's Progress kills four giants called Giant Grim, Giant Maul, Giant Slay-Good, and Giant Despair and participates in the slaying of a monster called Legion that terrorizes the city of Vanity Fair.

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5.

At least twenty-one natural or man-made geographical or topographical features from The Pilgrim's Progress have been identified—places and structures John Bunyan regularly would have seen as a child and, later, in his travels on foot or horseback.

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6.

Not long after its initial publication, The Pilgrim's Progress was being translated into multiple languages starting with Dutch in 1681, German in 1703 and Swedish in 1727, as well as over eighty African languages.

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7.

Little did the missionaries who distributed The Pilgrim's Progress know that the foreigners would appropriate it to make sense of their own experiences.

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8.

Third Part of the Pilgrim's Progress was written by an anonymous author; beginning in 1693, it was published with Bunyan's authentic two parts.

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9.

Pilgrim's Progress was a favourite subject among painters in 1840s America, including major figures of the Hudson River School and others associated with the National Academy of Design.

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10.

In 1850, Huntington, Cropsey, and Church contributed designs to a moving panorama based on The Pilgrim's Progress, conceptualized by May and fellow artist Joseph Kyle, which debuted in New York and travelled all over the country.

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11.

Walt Willis and Bob Shaw's classic science fiction fan novelette, The Enchanted Duplicator, is explicitly modeled on The Pilgrim's Progress and has been repeatedly reprinted over the decades since its first appearance in 1954: in professional publications, in fanzines, and as a monograph.

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12.

Hannah Hurnard's novel Hinds' Feet on High Places uses a similar allegorical structure to The Pilgrim's Progress and takes Bunyan's character Much-Afraid as its protagonist.

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13.

The structure of the novel is inspired by Pilgrim's Progress too, being composed largely of the narrator's seemingly omniscient reminiscences about other characters' inner lives and dreams.

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