A traveling tinker, John Bunyan accepted long imprisonment rather than give up preaching the Gospel. He explained the life of the Spirit in language the common people could understand and in pictures that stuck in the mind. When he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, his fame spread rapidly, and within fifty years of his death, the book was reputed to be in most English homes.

John Brown's biography of John Bunyan remains the standard, despite the lapse of over a hundred years since it was first published. The author was one of Bunyan's successors as minister of the church in Bedford. He shows that many of the scenes familiar to readers of The Pilgrim's Progress reflect local places and events and personal experience in the trials and joys of the Christian life.