Works of John Bunyan — Complete

John Bunyan wrote the most influential allegory in the English language while rotting in a 17th-century prison cell. Born the son of a tinker, he had been a swearer, a reprobate, a young man wholly given over to vice before something broke open in him - a terror of his own sinfulness and a desperate reaching toward grace. This collection gathers his complete works: the transcendent pilgrimage of Christian through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, toward a City whose gates stand open; the searing spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding; the allegorical warfare of The Holy War; and the sermons and treatises that made him the voice of dissenting Protestant England. Bunyan's prose has the directness of a man who spoke to common people in common words, yet it rings with the cadence of King James Bible and the psychological depth of a man who had stared into the abyss of his own damnation and found, impossibly, hope. This is not merely religious literature. It is the story of every human soul wrestling with sin, doubt, and the longing to arrive somewhere whole.