A new analytic equation of state for the Lennard-Jones fluid is proposed. The equation is based on a perturbed virial expansion with a theoretically defined temperature-dependent reference hard sphere term. The expansion is written for the Helmholtz free energy which guarantees the thermodynamic consistency of the pressure and internal energy. The equation covers much wider range of temperatures (up to seven times the critical temperature) than existing equations and is significantly more accurate and has less parameters than the best equation available to date, the modified Benedict-Webb-Rubin equation due to Johnson, Zollweg, and Gubbins (1993, Mol. Phys. 78 : 591-618). As a side-product, highly accurate explicit analytic correlations of the hard sphere diameters, as given by both the hybrid Barker-Henderson and Weeks-Chandler-Andersen theories, have been obtained. Computer simulation data to be regressed by the equation have been compiled from several sources and critically assessed. It has been shown that many literature data for state points with a large compressibility are subject to large systematic finite-size errors. Additional simulations on a series of systems of different sizes have been therefore performed to facilitate the extrapolation to the thermodynamic limit in the region close to the critical point.