Pilgrim's Progress

His account rivaled John Bunyan’s "The Pilgrim’s Progress" as a parable and primer for the Puritans’ holy but dangerous errand into the “howling wilderness,” as the historian John Demos recounts in "The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America," highlighting Williams' daughter's refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world.

He found inspiration piecing together scraps from other works, including from an opera he feared he would not finish, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and short contributions to a pageant that he had directed, “England’s Pleasant Land.”

That grueling, abject Pilgrim’s Progress of a performance, which took five years to complete, has much, symbolically, to say about the motivating power of melancholic spleen and about the creative genius of Black endurance in navigating the Great White Way.

Its pages are crowded with strangely named beings, most of them bizarre and off-putting; each stage of the hero’s extraterrestrial “Pilgrim’s Progress” generally ends with a murder or two; and the reader closes the book puzzled about what it has all meant.

“The idea of being afraid of you! Well, you see we used to play Pilgrim’s Progress, and we have been going on with it in earnest, all winter and summer.”