The Other Arthur Dent

Whenever the Puritan Arthur Dent (d. 1607) is mentioned in contemporary conversation, comparison is often made to a fictional character by that name in atheist Douglas Adams' science-fiction classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That Arthur Dent traveled through time and space wearing his robe somehow solving galactic problems. Although the latter is by far the most famous of the two Arthur Dents in our modern culture (there are other Arthur Dents in other dimensions of Adams' multiverse), the former Arthur Dent once was well known as the author of that book which was influential in the conversion of John Bunyan, that is, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven (1601) and which was reprinted later by Richard Baxter as The Poor Man's Family Book (1674). Interestingly, Adams claimed that he had never heard of the Puritan Arthur Dent, but his biographer has shown that in fact Adams "had seen an original seventeenth-century edition of [The Plain Man's Pathway] less than a year before he wrote the first outline of the Hitchhiker's Guide." Later, upon the death of Douglas Adams in 2001, an asteroid was named after the fictional Arthur Dent, although there is some reason to think that the footprint of a Puritan whose book influenced the "Immortal Dreamer" has indeed reached outer space.