书名：The Pilgrim’s Progress天路历程

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1040L
作者：John Bunyan约翰·班扬
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2009
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531292
商品尺寸：10.6 x 2.3 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：336 （以实物为准）
The Pilgrim’s Progress《天路历程》被誉为“英国文学中有名的寓言”，家喻户晓的程度仅次于《圣经》。十七世纪英国清教徒约翰·班扬因不信奉国教，被关押在狱十二年之久。《天路历程》作为他狱中心血凝成的杰作，讲述了一个坚韧的基督徒为寻求永生而踏上荆棘遍布的漫漫长旅。

本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，由Roger Lundin作序，Fay Weldon写后记，内容完整无删减，书本轻巧便携。
It is a masterpiece of religious allegory transformed into intense drama, its style unsurpassed, its characters superbly individualized, indelibly alive, and as memorable as the landmarks on Christian’s perilous journey toward salvation.
Introduction by Roger Lundin
Afterword by Fay Weldon
The Pilgrim’s Progress《天路历程》分为上下两卷。在上卷中，书中的叙述者在梦中看到一个叫做“基督徒”的人正在读一本书，知道了自己居住的城市将遭天火焚毁，惊恐不已。这时一个叫“传道者”的人指点他必须逃离自己的故乡，前往天国。基督徒背负着世界的重担，从此踏上了艰难而勇敢的历程，为自己、也为他人寻找救赎。下卷写的是基督徒的妻子“女基督徒”和孩子们在一个叫做“无畏”的人的指引下，前往天堂的朝圣过程。

这两个旅程目的及过程基本相似，都是经历各种艰难险阻，终于获得灵魂拯救。但也有不同处，前一部侧重基督徒作为真理的追寻者单独面对神圣的心路旅程，而第二部则侧重于基督徒作为爱的联合体共同追求天国目标的团体生活。其团体囊括了各种类型的基督徒，他们妇孺老功都有，信心大小不一，胆量力量各异，但在各种境遇中彼此相爱劝勉，彼此扶持担待，并在天路上一同成长。尤如一个满携着爱的家庭，没有竞争、求胜，都是和谐、秩序、体谅、担待和包容。

约翰·班扬，英国知名作家、布道家，出生于英格兰东部区域贝德福德郡的贝德福德。青年时期曾被征入革命的议会军，后在故乡从事传教活动。1660年斯图亚特王朝复辟，当局借口未经许可而传教，把他逮捕入狱两次，分别监禁十二年、六个月。狱中写就《天路历程》，内容讲述基督徒及其妻子先后寻找天国的经历，语言简洁平易，被誉为“英国文学中有名的寓言”。

John Bunyan was born in 1628. In 1644 he was caught up in the Civil War and drafted into the Parliamentary army. Four years later he entered a period of intense spiritual struggle (chronicled in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners), after which he emerged a new man. He joined a Nonconformist church and began to preach. Bunyan spent many years in prison because of his faith and during this time began writing The Pilgrim’s Progress. The first part was published in 1678 and the second part, together with the whole work, was published in 1684. Bunyan died in 1688.
Like many other great works of literature, The Pilgrim’s Progress was born in a prison. Perhaps paradoxically, the human spirit has often found in the barrenness of captivity a fertile source for poetry and prose of the highest order. A list of compelling works written in prison or about imprisonment would run the gamut from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians to Mary Rowlandson’s account of her captivity during the seventeenth-century Indian wars of New England, to Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn’s devastating history of The Gulag Archipelago. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson once observed, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” For a host of brilliant writers through the ages, the harrowing experience of captivity would seem not only to have concentrated the mind wonderfully but also to have driven the pen furiously.

In some instances, imprisonment largely deepened the insights and enhanced the reputation of writers already firmly established on their own literary merits. Sip Mandelstam was widely considered a major poet by the time Joseph Stalin had him arrested and left to die in a brutal labor camp in the late 1930s, and Dietrich Bon hoofer had become already a powerful presence in German theology when he was jailed and finally martyred in the last days of the Third Reich.