Robert Kolb is professor of systematic theology emeritus at Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis. He is the coeditor of the translation of the Book of Concord (2000) and of the Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology (2014). He has authored Luther's Wittenberg World (2018), Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God (2016), Luther and the Stories of God (2012), and Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (2009).

Luther's oft-recounted life made a profound impact on his contemporaries. Some revered him; some hated him. This volume provides a brief narrative of the unfolding events that took place from his birth to a young entrepreneurial family through his turbulent career as university professor and public figure to his death while on a mission to reconcile a feuding princely family. Following parts of this narrative come "interviews" with friends and foes of his time, taken from a variety of sixteenth-century sources that present this dominating reformer and the passions that possessed both those who found him to be God's end-time prophet and those who hated all that he stood for because they believed it was destroying their world.