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Early Modern · 1678; part two 1684
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan · 1628–1688
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What it is
Christian flees the City of Destruction with a burden on his back and travels through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of the Shadow to the Celestial City — written largely in prison by an unlicensed preacher.
Why it lasted
For two centuries the book most English-speaking households owned besides the Bible, and the source of a shared vocabulary for the Christian life that survives in ordinary idiom.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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