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.