John Bunyan

English · 1628 to 1688

Born in November 1628, baptised on November 30 in the village of Elstow near Bedford, England, John Bunyan was the son of a brazier, a mender of pots and kettles, and he learned that humble trade from his father. His schooling was brief, and he later said he soon lost the little reading and writing he had been taught. At sixteen he was conscripted into the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War, garrisoned at Newport Pagnell. Returning to Bedford, he married, fell into a long and tormented spiritual crisis, and joined an independent Puritan congregation, where he began to preach. In 1660, after the Restoration, he was arrested for preaching without a license and spent twelve years in Bedford county jail, refusing to promise he would stop. There he wrote Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a searching account of his own conversion and despair. During a second, shorter imprisonment he began The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), the allegory of Christian's journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City that became one of the most widely read books in the English language, never out of print since. He followed it with The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), The Holy War (1682), and a second part of The Pilgrim's Progress (1684) telling the journey of Christian's wife. Largely self-taught, he wrote in the plain speech of his Bedfordshire neighbors. He died on August 31, 1688, in London, having caught a fever after riding through rain to reconcile an estranged father and son, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, where his tomb still stands.