John Bunyan wrote the most widely read book in English after the Bible while serving twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching without a licence. A tinker's son with no formal education, he came to Puritan nonconformity through a long spiritual crisis he later recorded in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), an autobiography of despair so precise it reads as clinical. The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) sent Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and gave English its most durable allegorical landscape. Bunyan wrote it in the plain speech of the congregation he preached to, which is why it travelled: within a century it had been translated into dozens of languages and carried by missionaries around the world. He refused release from prison on the condition that he stop preaching. He wrote nearly sixty books, and died in London in 1688 after riding through rain to reconcile a father and son.