Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Before he wrote Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan wrote his own story. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) is his firsthand account of the fears, doubts, and grace that made him — the autobiography behind the allegory.

It's the primary source for who Bunyan really was, in a clean modern edition with the original linked free.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's spiritual autobiography, first published in 1666 while he was imprisoned in Bedford gaol for preaching without a license. Written in the plain, direct style of a Puritan conversion narrative, it traces Bunyan's life from a profane and troubled youth through years of intense religious anxiety to a settled assurance of God's grace.

The heart of the book is its account of prolonged spiritual struggle. Bunyan describes overhearing a few poor women in Bedford speaking joyfully of their faith, an encounter that awakened his own search. What follows is not a smooth path but a drawn-out battle with doubt, fear of having committed the unpardonable sin, and waves of despair, interrupted by sudden consolations he finds in particular verses of Scripture. He records the texts that wounded him and the texts that healed him with remarkable specificity.

The later sections turn to his call to preach, his ministry in the separatist congregation at Bedford, and his arrest and imprisonment in 1660 for unlawful religious assembly. Throughout, Bunyan presents himself as the "chief of sinners" precisely to magnify the mercy that reached him, and the book stands as a key forerunner to his far more famous allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was born in Elstow, near Bedford, England, into a poor working family; his father was a tinker, a mender of pots and kettles, a trade Bunyan followed. He had little formal education, served briefly in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War, and by his own account spent his youth given to cursing and swearing before religion took hold of him.

His conversion came gradually and painfully rather than in a single moment. It began when he overheard a group of poor women in Bedford talking about the new birth and the work of God in their hearts, which left him acutely aware of his own spiritual emptiness. Years of fear, doubt, and Scripture-soaked wrestling followed before he reached assurance. He joined the Bedford separatist congregation, became a preacher, and after the Restoration was imprisoned for twelve years for preaching without conformity to the Church of England, during which he wrote much of his most enduring work.