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This highly acclaimed biography explores how John Bunyan's writings and personality were influenced by the turbulent times in which he lived. The book examines the reasons why The Pilgrim's Progress holds a unique place in popular literature, and sheds new light on the meaning it held for its original readers. Christopher Hill believes that we should not view Bunyan's works as timeless literary artefacts, but take account of the social, political, and religious forces that acted upon their author. He explores the impact on Bunyan of his humble origins, the revolution of the 1640s and his experience in the Parlimentary army, his twelve-year imprisonment, and his difficulties in writing under censorship and persecution. The Pilgrim's Progress, which soon became the world's best-seller, is shown to derive from Bunyan's personal experience of defeat. - back cover.

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"All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power. Few writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree. In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of its impersonations. The dramatis persons are not shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the highest degree to 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' It is hardly inferior in "The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of 'Mansoul' have failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic power, which gives 'The Pilgrim's Progress' its universal popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen them. They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits."--Edmund Venables, M.A. (Author) - Amazon.com