The Pilgrim's Progress tells the story of a man named Christian pursuing his pilgrimage through Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond and the Delectable Mountains on his path towards the Celestial City and is one of the world's most famous religious allegories. John Bunyan wrote the first part of his tract while in prison for his religious beliefs, and it remains a supreme classic of the seventeenth-century English Puritan tradition. Yet he also created a profound folk-epic of the universal imagination, one that has had an immeasurable influence on the writing that followed it ever since.