Events

475 – The Roman general Orestes forces western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos to flee his capital city, Ravenna.

489 – Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths defeats Odoacer at the Battle of Isonzo, forcing his way into Italy.

1189 – Third Crusade: the Crusaders begin the Siege of Acre under Guy of Lusignan

1521 – The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.

1542 – Turkish-Portuguese War (1538-1557) – Battle of Wofla: the Portuguese are scattered, their leader Christovão da Gama is captured and later executed.

1609 – Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay.

1619 – Ferdinand II is elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

1640 – Second Bishop's War: King Charles I's English army loses to a Scottish Covenanter force at the Battle of Newburn.

1789 – William Herschel discovers a new moon of Saturn.

1810 – Battle of Grand Port – the French accept the surrender of a British Navy fleet.

1830 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's new ''Tom Thumb'' steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car, presaging steam's role in US railroading.

1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 receives Royal Assent, abolishing slavery through most the British Empire.

1845 – The first issue of ''Scientific American'' magazine is published.

1849 – After a month-long siege, Venice, which had declared itself independent as the Republic of San Marco, surrenders to Austria.

1859 – A geomagnetic storm causes the Aurora Borealis to shine so brightly that it is seen clearly over parts of USA, Europe, and even as far away as Japan.

1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas.

1867 – The United States takes possession of the, at this point unoccupied, Midway Atoll.

1879 – Cetshwayo, last king of the Zulus, is captured by the British.

1898 – Caleb Bradham invents the carbonated soft drink that will later be called "Pepsi-Cola".

1901 – Silliman University is founded in the Philippines. The first American private school in the country.

1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms.

1913 – Queen Wilhelmina opens the Peace Palace in The Hague.

1914 – World War I: the Royal Navy defeats the German fleet in the Battle of Heligoland Bight.

1914 – World War I: German troops conquer Namur.

1916 – World War I: Germany declares war on Romania.

1916 – World War I: Italy declares war on Germany.

1917 – Ten Suffragettes are arrested while picketing the White House.

1924 – The Georgian opposition stages the August Uprising against the Soviet Union.

1931 – France and Soviet Union sign a treaty of non-aggression.

1937 – Toyota Motors becomes an independent company.

1943 – World War II: in Denmark, a general strike against the Nazi occupation is started.

1944 – World War II: Marseille and Toulon are liberated.

1953 – Nippon Television broadcasts Japan's first television show, including its first TV advertisement.

1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.

1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the Senate from voting on Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later, the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator.

1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his ''I Have a Dream'' speech

1963 – Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie are murdered in their Manhattan flat, prompting the events that would lead to the passing of the Miranda Rights.

1964 – The Philadelphia race riot begins.

1968 – Riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention.

1979 – An IRA bomb explodes on the Grand Place in Brussels.

1988 – Ramstein airshow disaster: three aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team collide and the wreckage falls into the crowd. 75 are killed and 346 seriously injured.

1990 – Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province.

1990 – The Plainfield Tornado: an F5 tornado hits in Plainfield, Illinois, and Joliet, Illinois, killing 28 people.

1991 – Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union.

1991 – Collapse of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

1996 – Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce.

1998 – Pakistan's National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the "Qur'an and Sunnah" the "supreme law" but the bill is defeated in the Senate.

2003 – An electricity blackout cuts off power to around 500,000 people living in south east England and brings 60% of London's underground rail network to a halt.

2010 – Restoring Honor Rally (hosted by noted conservative Glenn Beck) held in Washington, DC at the Lincoln Memorial.

Births

1025 – Emperor Go-Reizei of Japan (d. 1068)

1582 – Taichang Emperor, of the Ming Dynasty of China (d. 1620)

1592 – George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, English statesman (d. 1628)

1612 – Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, Dutch scholar (d. 1653)

1667 – Louise of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, queen of Denmark and Norway (d. 1721)

1691 – Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Holy Roman Empire Empress (d. 1750)

1714 – Anthony Ulrich II, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (d. 1774)

1749 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and scientist (d. 1832)

1774 – Elizabeth Ann Seton, American-born Catholic saint (d. 1821)

1789 – Stéphanie de Beauharnais, Grand Duchess of Baden (d. 1860)

1801 – Antoine Augustin Cournot, French mathematician (d. 1877)

1814 – Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish writer (d. 1873)

1827 – Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna of Russia (d. 1894)

1828 – Leo Tolstoy, Russian author (birthdate according to O.S.) (d. 1910)

1840 – Alexander Cameron Sim, Scottish merchant (d. 1900)

1853 – Vladimir Shukhov, Russian engineer and inventor (d. 1939)

1859 – Vittorio Sella, Italian photographer (d. 1943)

1867 – Umberto Giordano, Italian composer (d. 1948)

1878 – George Whipple, American doctor and Nobel laureate (d. 1976)

1884 – Peter Fraser, former Prime Minister of New Zealand (d. 1950)

1885 – Vance Palmer, Australian author (d. 1959)

1887 – István Kühár, Slovene (Prekmurian) writer and politician (d. 1922)

1894 – Karl Böhm, Austrian conductor (d. 1981)

1898 – Charlie Grimm, American baseball player (d. 1983)

1899 – Charles Boyer, French actor (d. 1978)

1899 – Andrei Platonov, Russian writer (d. 1951)

1903 – Bruno Bettelheim, American psychologist (d. 1990)

1904 – Secondo Campini, Italian jet engine pioneer (d. 1980)

1905 – Cyril Walters, England cricketer (d. 1992)

1906 – John Betjeman, English poet (d. 1984)

1908 – Roger Tory Peterson, American ornithologist (d. 1996)

1910 – Tjalling Koopmans, Dutch-born economist Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1985)

1911 – Joseph Luns, Dutch politician (d. 2002)

1913 – Robertson Davies, Canadian writer (d. 1995)

1913 – Jack Dreyfus, American entrepreneur (d. 2009)

1913 – Lindsay Hassett, Australian cricketer (d. 1993)

1913 – Robert Irving, British conductor (d. 1991)

1913 – Boris Pahor, Slovenian writer

1913 – Terence Reese, British bridge player (d. 1996)

1913 – Richard Tucker, American tenor (d. 1975)

1915 – Max Robertson, British sports commentator (d. 2009)

1915 – Tasha Tudor, American illustrator (d. 2008)

1916 – Hélène Baillargeon, Quebec singer and folklorist (d. 1997)

1916 – C. Wright Mills American sociologist (d. 1962)

1916 – Jack Vance, American author

1917 – Jack Kirby, American comic book artist (d. 1994)

1919 – Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, English electrical engineer Nobel Laureate (d. 2004)

1921 – Fernando Fernán Gómez, Spanish actor, director, academic and playwright (d. 2007)

1921 – Nancy Kulp, American actress (d. 1991)

1924 – Janet Frame, New Zealand author (d. 2004)

1924 – Peggy Ryan, American actress (d. 2004)

1924 – Tony MacGibbon, New Zealand cricketer

1925 – Donald O'Connor, American singer, dancer, and actor (d. 2003)

1925 – Billy Grammer, American country music singer and guitarist (d. 2011)

1928 – F. William Free, American advertising executive (d. 2003)

1929 – István Kertész, Hungarian conductor (d. 1973)

1929 – Ken Gampu, South African actor (d. 2003)

1930 – Windsor Davies, British actor

1930 – Ben Gazzara, American actor

1931 – John Shirley-Quirk, English bass-baritone

1931 – Tito Capobianco, Argentinian stage impresario and director

1932 – Andy Bathgate, Canadian ice hockey player

1935 – Gilles Rocheleau, French Canadian politician (d. 1998)

1936 – Don Denkinger, American baseball umpire

1938 – Paul Martin, Canadian politician

1938 – Maurizio Costanzo, Italian television journalist

1940 – Ken Jenkins, American actor

1940 – Roger Pingeon, French cylist

1940 – Nik Turner, English musician (Hawkwind)

1941 – Sybille de Selys Longchamps, Belgian aristocrat

1941 – Paul Plishka, American opera singer

1942 – Sterling Morrison, American guitarist (The Velvet Underground) (d. 1995)

1943 – David Soul, American actor

1943 – Lou Piniella, American baseball manager

1943 – Surayud Chulanont, Thai 24th Prime Minister (former)

1944 – Marianne Heemskerk, Dutch swimmer

1945 – Robert Greenwald, American film director/producer

1945 – Bob Segarini, American musician

1944 – Melvin Dummar, American claimant to the Howard Hughes estate

1947 – Liza Wang, Hong Kong actress

1948 – Danny Seraphine, American musician (Chicago)

1948 – Murray Parker, New Zealand cricketer

1948 – Heather Reisman, Canadian businesswoman

1949 – Hugh Cornwell, British musician (The Stranglers)

1949 – Svetislav Pešić, Serbian basketball player and coach

1950 – Ron Guidry, American baseball player and coach

1951 – Keiichi Suzuki, Japanese composer

1951 – Wayne Osmond, American singer (The Osmonds)

1952 – Rita Dove, American poet

1952 – Wendelin Wiedeking, German businessman

1952 – Guy Nadon, Canadian actor

1952 – Jacques Chagnon, Canadian politician

1954 – George Church, American geneticist

1956 – Luis Guzmán, Puerto Rican actor

1956 – Mark Lutz, Puerto Rican actor

1957 – Ivo Josipovic, President of Croatia

1957 – Daniel Stern, American actor

1957 – Rick Rossovich, American actor

1958 – Scott Hamilton, American figure skater

1960 – Emma Samms, English actress

1960 – Dinah Cancer, American singer 45 Grave

1961 – Kim Appleby, English singer

1961 – Cliff Benson, American football player

1962 – Paul Allen, English footballer

1962 – Craig Anton, American actor and Comedian

1962 – David Fincher, American music video and film director

1963 – Jennifer Coolidge, American actress

1963 – Regina Jacobs, American athlete

1965 – Satoshi Tajiri, founder of Game Freak

1965 – Amanda Tapping, Canadian actress, director and producer

1965 – Shania Twain, Canadian singer

1966 – Priya Dutt, Indian social worker and politician

1968 – Billy Boyd, Scottish actor

1969 – Jason Priestley, Canadian-born actor

1969 – Jack Black, American actor

1969 – Mary McCartney, English photographer

1969 – Pierre Turgeon, French Canadian ice hockey player

1970 – Sherrié Austin, Australian actress/singer

1970 – Rick Recht, Jewish singer

1971 – Todd Eldredge, American figure skater

1971 – Janet Evans, American swimmer

1971 – Raul Marquez, Mexican-born American boxer

1971 – Shane Andrews, American baseball player

1972 – Jay Witasick, American baseball player

1972 – Ravindu Shah, Kenyan cricketer

1973 – Matthew John Armstrong, American actor

1973 – DJ Assault, American musician

1973 – Kirby Morrow, Canadian voice actor

1974 – Johan Andersson, Swedish game programmer

1974 – Carsten Jancker, German footballer

1974 – Takahito Eguchi, Japanese composer

1974 – Kaori Mizuhashi, Japanese voice actress

1975 – Jamie Cureton, English footballer

1975 – Gareth Farrelly, Irish footballer

1975 – Vera Jordanova, Finnish actress and model

1976 – Federico Magallanes, Uruguayan footballer

1978 – Jess Margera, American drummer (CKY)

1979 – Robert Hoyzer, German football referee

1979 – Shaila Durcal, Spanish singer

1979 – Kristen Hughes, Australian netballer

1979 – Markus Pröll, German footballer

1979 – Ruth Riley, American basketball player

1980 – Debra Lafave, American former teacher and convicted sex offender

1980 – Carly Pope, Canadian actress

1981 – Martin Erat, Czech hockey player

1981 – Daniel Gygax, Swiss footballer

1981 – Agata Wróbel, Polish weightlifter

1981 – Raphael Matos, Brazilian racing driver

1982 – Anderson Silva de França, Brazilian footballer

1982 – LeAnn Rimes, American singer

1982 – Kevin McNaughton, Scottish footballer

1982 – Thiago Motta, Brazilian footballer

1983 – Lasith Malinga, Sri Lankan cricketer

1983 – Alfonso Herrera, Mexican actor and singer (RBD)

1983 – Luke McAlister, New Zealand All Black rugby player

1984 – Sarah Roemer, American actress and model

1986 – Gilad Shalit, Israeli soldier

1986 – Jeff Green, American basketball player

1986 – Florence Welch, British singer (Florence + the Machine)

1986 – Mohombi, Swedish-Colognese singer

1989 – César Azpilicueta, Spanish footballer

1989 – Cassadee Pope, American Pop Musician (Hey Monday)

1989 – Jokwon, South Korean singer (2AM)

1990 – Bojan Krkić, Spanish footballer

1991 – Kyle Massey, American actor and rapper

1999 – Prince Nikolai of Denmark, Danish royalty

Deaths

388 – Magnus Maximus, Roman usurper

430 – Augustine of Hippo, North African saint and theologian (b. 354)

1341 – King Leo V of Armenia (b. 1309)

1481 – King Afonso V of Portugal (b. 1432)

1645 – Hugo Grotius, Dutch philosopher and writer (b. 1583)

1654 – Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden (b. 1583)

1678 – John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, English soldier (b. 1602)

1757 – David Hartley, English philosopher (b. 1705)

1784 – Junípero Serra, Spanish missionary (b. 1713)

1785 – Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, French sculptor (b. 1714)

1793 – Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine, French general (executed) (b. 1740)

1805 – Alexander Carlyle, Scottish church leader (b. 1722)

1818 – Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, founder of Chicago

1820 – Andrew Ellicott, American surveyor (b. 1754)

1839 – William Smith, English geologist (b. 1769)

1900 – Henry Sidgwick, English philosopher (b. 1838)

1903 – Frederick Law Olmsted, American landscape architect (b. 1822)

1933 – Helen Dunbar, American actress (b. 1863)

1943 – Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria (b. 1894)

1947 – Manolete, Spanish bullfighter (b. 1917)

1955 – Emmett Till, American civil rights movement icon (b. 1941)

1959 – Bohuslav Martinů, Czech composer (b. 1890)

1965 – Giulio Racah, Israeli physicist (b. 1909)

1971 – Reuvein Margolies, Austrian-Hungarian-born Israeli author and Talmudic scholar (b. 1889)

1972 – Prince William of Gloucester of the British Royal Family (b. 1941)

1975 – Fritz Wotruba, Austrian sculptor (b. 1907)

1976 – Anissa Jones, American actress (b. 1958)

1978 – Robert Shaw, English actor and writer (b. 1927)

1981 – Béla Guttman, Hungarian footballer (b. 1900)

1982 – Geoff Chubb, South African cricketer (b. 1911)

1985 – Ruth Gordon, American actress (b. 1896)

1987 – John Huston, American movie director (b. 1906)

1988 – Jean Marchand, French Canadian union leader and politician (b. 1918)

1990 – Willy Vandersteen, Belgian cartoonist (b. 1913)

1991 – Alekos Sakellarios, Greek writer and film director (b. 1913)

1993 – William Stafford, American poet (b. 1914)

1995 – Earl Bascom, American rodeo pioneer (b. 1906)

1997 – Masaru Takumi, Japanese yakuza lord (b. 1936)

2003 – Brian Douglas Wells, American criminal (failed) (b. 1956)

2005 – Jacques Dufilho, French actor (b. 1914)

2005 – Esther Szekeres, Hungarian mathematician (b. 1910)

2005 – George Szekeres, Hungarian mathematician (b. 1911)

2006 – Benoît Sauvageau, French Canadian politician (b. 1963)

2006 – Melvin Schwartz, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1932)

2007 – Arthur Jones, American inventor of the Nautilus exercise machines (b. 1926)

2007 – Hilly Kristal, American musician (b. 1932)

2007 – Paul B. MacCready, Jr., American aeronautical engineer (b. 1925)

2007 – Antonio Puerta, Spanish footballer (b. 1984)

2007 – Francisco Umbral, Spanish journalist, novelist, biographer and essayist (b. 1935)

2007 – Miyoshi Umeki, Japanese-born American actress (b. 1929)

2007 – Nikola Nobilo, New Zealand winemaker (b. 1913)

2008 – Phil Hill, American race car driver and one-time F1 world champion (b. 1927)

2009 – Adam Goldstein, American DJ also known as DJ AM (b. 1973)

2009 – Wayne Tippit, American actor (b. 1932)

2010 – William P. Foster, American band director and educator (b. 1919)

2011 – Bernie Gallacher, British footballer (Aston Villa) (b. 1967)

Holidays and observances

Assumption of Mary (Eastern Orthodox Church, a public holiday in the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, and Georgia)

Christian Feast Day:

*Augustine of Hippo

*Saint Hermes

*August 28 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

External links

BBC: On This Day

On This Day in Canada

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Category:Days of the year Category:August

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Name	Martin Luther King, Jr.
Birth name	Michael King, Jr.
Birth date	January 15, 1929
Birth place	Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Death date	April 04, 1968
Death place	Memphis, Tennessee, United States
Signature	Martin Luther King Jr Signature2.svg
Parents	Martin Luther King, Sr.Alberta Williams King
Spouse	Coretta Scott King (m. 1953–68)
Children	Yolanda Denise-King (deceased)Martin Luther King IIIDexter Scott KingBernice Albertine King
Movement	African-American Civil Rights Movement, Peace movement
Organization	Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Monuments	Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
Alma mater	Morehouse College (B.A.) Crozer Theological Seminary (B.D.) Boston University (Ph.D.)
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize (1964), Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977, posthumous), Congressional Gold Medal (2004, posthumous)
Religion	Baptist (Progressive National Baptist Convention)
Influences	Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Benjamin Mays, Hosea Williams, Bayard Rustin, Henry David Thoreau, Howard Thurman, Leo Tolstoy
Influenced	}}

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King has become a national icon in the history of modern American liberalism.

A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. King's efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he expanded American values to include the vision of a color blind society, and established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.

In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and stopping the Vietnam War.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986.

Early life and education

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the middle child of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King Jr. had an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King. King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie ''Gone with the Wind.''

King was originally skeptical of many of Christianity's claims. Most striking, perhaps, was his initial denial of the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school at the age of thirteen. From this point, he stated, "doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly". However, he later concluded that the Bible has "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and decided to enter the seminary.

Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. A precocious student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grade and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology, and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children; Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was twenty-five years old, in 1954. King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman". A 1980s inquiry concluded portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly but that his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship",

Influences

Thurman

Civil rights leader, theologian, and educator Howard Thurman was an early influence on King. A classmate of King's father at Morehouse College, Thurman mentored the young King and his friends. Thurman's missionary work had taken him abroad where he had met and conferred with Mahatma Gandhi. When he was a student at Boston University, King often visited Thurman, who was the dean of Marsh Chapel. Walter Fluker, who has studied Thurman's writings, has stated, "I don't believe you'd get a Martin Luther King, Jr. without a Howard Thurman".

Gandhi and Rustin

With assistance from the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee, and inspired by Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King visited Gandhi's birthplace in India in 1959. The trip to India affected King in a profound way, deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation." African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin had studied Gandhi's teachings. Rustin counseled King to dedicate himself to the principles of non-violence, served as King's main advisor and mentor throughout his early activism, and was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin's open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin.

Public stance on political parties

As the leader of the SCLC, King maintained a policy of not publicly endorsing a U.S. political party or candidate: "I feel someone must remain in the position of non-alignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both—not the servant or master of either."

In a 1958 interview, he expressed his view that neither party was perfect, saying, "I don't think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses ... And I'm not inextricably bound to either party."

King critiqued both parties' performance on promoting racial equality: }}

Personal political advocacy

Although King never publicly supported a political party or candidate for president, in a letter to a civil rights supporter in October 1956 he said that he was undecided as to whether he would vote for the Adlai Stevenson or Dwight Eisenhower, but that "In the past I always voted the Democratic ticket."

In his autobiography, King says that in 1960 he privately voted for Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy: "I felt that Kennedy would make the best president. I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one." King adds that he likely would have made an exception to his non-endorsement policy in 1964, saying "Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964."

Sermons and speeches

Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a "passionate" statement of his crusade for justice. His I Have a Dream speech is a 17 minute public speech delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for racial equality and an end to discrimination. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to racial prejudice in the United States.

Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with the Jim Crow laws. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; because Colvin was pregnant and unmarried, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States District Court ruling in ''Browder v. Gayle'' that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King led the SCLC until his death.

On September 20, 1958, while signing copies of his book ''Stride Toward Freedom'' in Blumstein's department store on 125th Street, in Harlem, King was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by Izola Curry, a deranged black woman, and narrowly escaped death. Gandhi's nonviolent techniques were useful to King's campaign to change the civil rights laws implemented in Alabama. King applied non-violent philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. In 1959, he wrote ''The Measure of A Man'', from which the piece ''What is Man?'', an attempt to sketch the optimal political, social, and economic structure of society, is derived. His SCLC secretary and personal assistant in this period was Dora McDonald.

The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began telephone tapping King in the fall of 1963. Concerned that allegations (of Communists in the SCLC), if made public, would derail the Administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. J Edgar Hoover feared Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.

King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

King and the SCLC put into practice many of the principles of the Christian Left and applied the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent.

Albany movement

The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia in November 1961. In December, King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city and attracted nationwide attention. When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel." But the following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. "Those agreements", said King, "were dishonored and violated by the city," as soon as he left town. King returned in July 1962, and was sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Chief Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools... ejected from churches... and thrown into jail... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail."

After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote non-violence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts. However, it was credited as a key lesson in tactics for the national civil rights movement.

Birmingham campaign

The Birmingham campaign was a strategic effort by the SCLC to promote civil rights for African Americans. Many of its tactics of "Project C" were developed by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Executive Director of SCLC from 1960–64. Based on actions in Birmingham, Alabama, its goal was to end the city's segregated civil and discriminatory economic policies. The campaign lasted for more than two months in the spring of 1963. To provoke the police into filling the city's jails to overflowing, King and black citizens of Birmingham employed nonviolent tactics to flout laws they considered unfair. King summarized the philosophy of the Birmingham campaign when he said, "The purpose of ... direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation".

Protests in Birmingham began with a boycott to pressure businesses to offer sales jobs and other employment to people of all races, as well as to end segregated facilities in the stores. When business leaders resisted the boycott, King and the SCLC began what they termed Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke arrest. After the campaign ran low on adult volunteers, SCLC's strategist, James Bevel, initiated the action and recruited the children for what became known as the "Children's Crusade". During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs to control protesters, including children. Not all of the demonstrators were peaceful, despite the avowed intentions of the SCLC. In some cases, bystanders attacked the police, who responded with force. King and the SCLC were criticized for putting children in harm's way. By the end of the campaign, King's reputation improved immensely, Connor lost his job, the "Jim Crow" signs in Birmingham came down, and public places became more open to blacks.

St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama

King and SCLC were also driving forces behind the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. The movement engaged in nightly marches in the city met by white segregationists who violently assaulted them. Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed.

King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months. A sweeping injunction issued by a local judge barred any gathering of 3 or more people under sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC, or DCVL, or with the involvement of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2, 1965.

March on Washington, 1963

King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer, Jr. of the Congress of Racial Equality. The primary logistical and strategic organizer was King's colleague Bayard Rustin. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.

The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern United States and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to denounce and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington," and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from attending the march.

The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington's history. King's "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Infamy Speech, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.

The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the very top of the liberal political agenda in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Stance on compensation

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for ''Playboy'' in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils". He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of ''all'' races".

"Bloody Sunday", 1965

King, James Bevel, and the SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7 was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. King met with officials in the Johnson administration on March 5 in order to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but he later wrote, "If I had any idea that the state troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line." Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.

King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march and on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that has become known as "How Long, Not Long".

Chicago, 1966

In 1966, after several successes in the South, King and others in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as its first destination. King and Ralph Abernathy, both from the middle class, moved into a building at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave., in the slums of North Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago, as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.

The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of The Chicago Freedom Movement. During that spring, several dual white couple/black couple tests on real estate offices uncovered the practice (now banned in the U.S.) of racial steering. These tests revealed the racially selective processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes, with the only difference being their race.

The needs of the movement for radical change grew, and several larger marches were planned and executed, including those in the following neighborhoods: Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park and Marquette Park among others.

In Chicago, Abernathy later wrote that they received a worse reception than they had in the South. Their marches, especially the one through Marquette Park on August 5, 1966, were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs, and they were truly afraid of starting a riot. King's beliefs militated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result from the demonstration. King, who received death threats throughout his involvement in the civil rights movement, was hit by a brick during one march but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.

When King and his allies returned to the south, they left Jesse Jackson, a seminary student who had previously joined the movement in the South, in charge of their organization. Jackson continued their struggle for civil rights by organizing the Operation Breadbasket movement that targeted chain stores that did not deal fairly with blacks.

Opposition to the Vietnam War

Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:

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King also was opposed to the Vietnam War on the grounds that the war took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare services like the War on Poverty. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death".

King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, union leaders and powerful publishers. "The press is being stacked against me," King complained. ''Life'' magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and ''The Washington Post'' declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

King stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands". King also criticized the United States' resistance to North Vietnam's land reforms. He accused the United States of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children."

The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism," he also rejected Communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism," and its "political totalitarianism."

King also stated, in his "Beyond Vietnam", speech that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring". King quoted a United States official who said that, from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and said that the United States should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.

King spoke at an Anti-Vietnam demonstration where he also brought up issues of civil rights and the draft.

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In 1967, King gave another speech, in which he lashed out against what he called the "cruel irony" of American blacks fighting and dying for a country which treated them as second class citizens:

On January 13, 1968, the day after President Johnson's State of the Union Address, King called for a large march on Washington against "one of history's most cruel and senseless wars".

Poor People's Campaign, 1968

In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created a bill of rights for poor Americans.

However, the campaign was not unanimously supported by other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin resigned from the march stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black. Throughout his participation in the civil rights movement, King was criticized by many groups. This included opposition by more militant blacks and such prominent critics as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X. Stokely Carmichael was a separatist and disagreed with King's plea for racial integration because he considered it an insult to a uniquely African-American culture. Omali Yeshitela urged Africans to remember the history of violent European colonization and how power was not secured by Europeans through integration, but by violence and force.

King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America's cities. He felt that Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity and generosity". He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided "poverty funds with miserliness". His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism", and argued that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced".

Assassination and its aftermath

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.

On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, owned by Walter Bailey, in Memphis. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King's close friend and colleague who was present at the assassination, testified under oath to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often it was known as the "King-Abernathy suite."

According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony prior to his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."

Then, at 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. The events following the shooting have been disputed, as some people have accused Jackson of exaggerating his response.

After emergency chest surgery, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only thirty-nine years old, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old man, perhaps a result of the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights movement.

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kentucky, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of non-violence. James Farmer, Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey attended King's funeral on behalf of the President, as there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and perhaps violence.

At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral, a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity". His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.

The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.

Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. Ray was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Ray fired Foreman as his attorney, from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher". He claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec, with the alias "Raoul" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had. On June 10, 1977, shortly after Ray had testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King, he and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.

Allegations of conspiracy

Ray's lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists. One of the claims used to support this assertion is that Ray's confession was given under pressure, and he had been threatened with the death penalty. Ray was a thief and burglar, but he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.

Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point to the two successive ballistics tests which while proving that a rifle similar to Ray's Remington Gamemaster had been the murder weapon, did not prove that his specific rifle had been the one used. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house—which had been inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination—and not from the rooming house window.

In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial. Two years later, Coretta Scott King, King's widow, along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that government agencies were party to the assassination. William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial. King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by author Gerald Posner who has researched and written about the assassination.

In 2000, the United States Department of Justice completed the investigation about Jowers' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented. In 2002, ''The New York Times'' reported a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson—not James Earl Ray—assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." Wilson provided no evidence to back up his claims.

King's friend and colleague, James Bevel, disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man." In 2004, Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted:

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Personality and public image

FBI surveillance and wiretapping

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for years had been suspicious about potential influence of communists in social movements such as labor unions and civil rights. Hoover directed the FBI to track King in 1957, and the SCLC as it was established (it did not have a full-time executive director until 1960); its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. The FBI found Levison had been involved with the Communist Party USA. The FBI feared Levison was working as an "agent of influence" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them. Another King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). However, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.

The Bureau received authorization to proceed with wiretapping from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 and informed President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy. The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison's and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country.

For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating in a 1965 ''Playboy'' interview that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida", and claiming that Hoover was "following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South" and that his concern for communist infiltration of the civil rights movement was meant to "aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements". Hoover did not believe his pledge of innocence and replied by saying that King was "the most notorious liar in the country." After King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country". They alleged that King was "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists".

The attempt to prove that King was a Communist was related to the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators". However, the civil rights movement arose from activism within the black community dating back to before World War I. King said that "the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals—the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations."

Allegations of adultery

Having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, the FBI shifted to attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs. Lyndon Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher". Ralph Abernathy, a close associate of King's, stated in his 1989 autobiography ''And the Walls Came Tumbling Down'' that King had a "weakness for women". In a later interview, Abernathy said he only wrote the term "womanizing", did not specifically say King had extramarital sex and that the infidelities King had were emotional rather than sexual. King's biographer David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship, rather than his marriage, increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings...of King's travels." King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction." Garrow noted that King's promiscuity was the cause of "painful and overwhelming guilt".

The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work. One anonymous letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part, "The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation." King interpreted this as encouragement for him to commit suicide, although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC." King refused to give in to the FBI's threats. Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr. in 1977 ordered that all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

Across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the boarding house in which James Earl Ray was staying, was a fire station. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance. Using papered-over windows with peepholes cut into them, the agents were watching the scene while Martin Luther King was shot. Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel, and Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first aid to King. The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby have led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.

Legacy

King's main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the United States, which has enabled more Americans to reach their potential. He is frequently referenced as a human rights icon today. His name and legacy have often been invoked since his death as people have debated his likely position on various modern political issues.

On the international scene, King's legacy included influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and Civil Rights Movement in South Africa. King's work was cited by and served as an inspiration for South African leader Albert Lutuli, another black Nobel Peace prize winner who fought for racial justice in his country. The day following King's assassination, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise with her class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help them understand King's death as it related to racism, something they little understood from having lived in a predominately white community.

King's wife, Coretta Scott King, followed her husband's footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, she established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide. Their son, Dexter King, currently serves as the center's chairman. Daughter Yolanda King, who died in 2007, was a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.

There are opposing views, even within the King family, of the slain civil rights leader's religious and political views about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. King's widow Coretta said publicly that she believed her husband would have supported gay rights. However, his daughter Bernice believed he would have been opposed to gay marriage. The King Center includes discrimination, and lists homophobia as one of its examples, in its list of "The Triple Evils" that should be opposed.

In 1980, the Department of Interior designated King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several nearby buildings the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. In 1996, United States Congress authorized the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity to establish a foundation to manage fund raising and design of a national Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. King was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, established by and for African Americans. King was the first African American honored with his own memorial in the National Mall area and the first non-President to be commemorated in such a way. The King Memorial will be administered by the National Park Service.

King's life and assassination inspired many artistic works. A 1976 Broadway production, ''I Have a Dream'', was directed by Robert Greenwald and starred Billy Dee Williams as King. In spring of 2006, a stage play ''Passages of Martin Luther King'' about King was produced in Beijing, China with King portrayed by Chinese actor, Cao Li. The play was written by Stanford University professor, Clayborne Carson.

King spoke earlier about what people should remember him for if they are around for his funeral. He said rather than his awards and where he went to school, people should talk about how he fought peacefully for justice:

The King Center

"Martin Luther King Jr. Collection", Morehouse College, RWWL

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project

Martin Luther King Jr., "A New Sense of Direction (1968)"

"Martin Luther King Jr.", ''The Seattle Times''

1956 Comic Book: ''Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story''

Kirk, John A., "Martin Luther King, Jr.", ''New Georgia Encyclopedia''

"Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle", online encyclopedia, chronology and document library, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.

"Martin Luther King, Jr.", ''Encyclopedia of Alabama''

;Images

"Martin Luther King Jr.: Peacemaker", slideshow by ''Life'' magazine

The Life and Death of Martin Luther King, slideshow by ''The First Post''

Photo Essay: "The Last Days of Martin Luther King, Jr.", ''Time''

;Speeches and interviews

Audio from April 1961 King, "The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tensions", speech at Southern Seminary

"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929–1968", one hour documentary report by ''Democracy Now!''

"Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Speeches and Interviews"

The New Negro, King interviewed by J. Waites Waring

"Interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark", PBS

"Beyond Vietnam" speech text and audio

King Institute Encyclopedia multimedia

Why I Am Oppposed to the War in Vietnam, sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967 (audio of speech with video 23:31)

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Name	Martin Luther
Birth date	November 10, 1483
Birth place	Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Death date	February 18, 1546
Death place	Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Titles	Monk, Priest, Theologian
Spouse	Katharina von Bora
Parents	Hans and Margarethe Luther (née Lindemann)
Children	Hans (Johannes), Elisabeth, Magdalena, Martin, Paul, Margarethe
notableworks	The Ninety-Five Theses, Luther's Large Catechism, Luther's Small Catechism, On the Freedom of a Christian
influences	Paul the Apostle, Augustine of Hippo
influenced	Philipp Melanchthon, Lutheranism
Signature	Martin Luther Signature.svg }}

Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his ''Ninety-Five Theses'' in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.

His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible. His hymns influenced the development of singing in churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.

In his later years, while suffering from several illnesses and deteriorating health, Luther became increasingly antisemitic, writing that Jewish homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned, money confiscated and liberty curtailed. These statements have contributed to his controversial status.

Early life

Birth and education

Martin Luther was born to ''Hans Luder'' (or Ludher, later Luther) and his wife Margarethe (née Lindemann) on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was baptized as a Catholic the next morning on the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. His family moved to Mansfeld in 1484, where his father was a leaseholder of copper mines and smelters and served as one of four citizen representatives on the local council. The religious scholar Martin Marty describes Luther's mother as a hard-working woman of "trading-class stock and middling means" and notes that Luther's enemies would later wrongly describe her as a whore and bath attendant. He had several brothers and sisters, and is known to have been close to one of them, Jacob. Hans Luther was ambitious for himself and his family, and he was determined to see Martin, his eldest son, become a lawyer. He sent Martin to Latin schools in Mansfeld, then Magdeburg in 1497, where he attended a school operated by a lay group called the Brethren of the Common Life, and Eisenach in 1498. The three schools focused on the so-called "''trivium''": grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Luther later compared his education there to purgatory and hell.

In 1501, at the age of nineteen, he entered the University of Erfurt – which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse. The schedule called for waking at four every morning for what has been described as "a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises." He received his master's degree in 1505.

In accordance with his father's wishes, Luther enrolled in law school at the same university that year but dropped out almost immediately, believing that law represented uncertainty. Luther sought assurances about life and was drawn to theology and philosophy, expressing particular interest in Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel. He was deeply influenced by two tutors, Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter, who taught him to be suspicious of even the greatest thinkers and to test everything himself by experience. Philosophy proved to be unsatisfying, offering assurance about the use of reason but none about loving God, which to Luther was more important. Reason could not lead men to God, he felt, and he thereafter developed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle over the latter's emphasis on reason. For Luther, reason could be used to question men and institutions, but not God. Human beings could learn about God only through divine revelation, he believed, and Scripture therefore became increasingly important to him.

He later attributed his decision to an event: on 2 July 1505, he was on horseback during a thunderstorm and a lightning bolt struck near him as he was returning to university after a trip home. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left law school, sold his books, and entered a closed Augustinian friary in Erfurt on 17 July 1505. One friend blamed the decision on Luther's sadness over the deaths of two friends. Luther himself seemed saddened by the move. Those who attended a farewell supper walked him to the door of the Black Cloister. "This day you see me, and then, not ever again," he said. His father was furious over what he saw as a waste of Luther's education.

Monastic and academic life

Luther dedicated himself to monastic life, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage, and frequent confession. He would later remark, "If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them." Luther described this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul."

Johann von Staupitz, his superior, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career. In 1507, he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1508 began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. He received a Bachelor's degree in Biblical studies on 9 March 1508, and another Bachelor's degree in the ''Sentences'' by Peter Lombard in 1509. On 19 October 1512, he was awarded his Doctor of Theology and, on 21 October 1512, was received into the senate of the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg, having been called to the position of ''Doctor in Bible''. He spent the rest of his career in this position at the University of Wittenberg.

The start of the Reformation

In 1516, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man; justification rather depends only on such faith as is active in charity and good works (''fides caritate formata'') can justify man. The benefits of good works could be obtained by donating money to the church.

On 31 October 1517, Luther wrote to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," which came to be known as ''The Ninety-Five Theses''. Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther had no intention of confronting the church, but saw his disputation as a scholarly objection to church practices, and the tone of the writing is accordingly "searching, rather than doctrinaire." Hillerbrand writes that there is nevertheless an undercurrent of challenge in several of the theses, particularly in Thesis 86, which asks: "Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?"

Luther objected to a saying attributed to Johann Tetzel that "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory [also attested as 'into heaven'] springs."

He insisted that, since forgiveness was God's alone to grant, those who claimed that indulgences absolved buyers from all punishments and granted them salvation were in error. Christians, he said, must not slacken in following Christ on account of such false assurances.

However, this oft-quoted saying of Tetzel was by no means representative of the ''official'' Catholic teaching on indulgences, but rather, more a reflection of his capacity to exaggerate. Yet if Tetzel overstated the matter in regard to indulgences for the ''dead'', his teaching on indulgences for the ''living'' was pure.

According to scholars Walter Krämer, Götz Trenkler, Gerhard Ritter and Gerhard Prause, the story of the posting on the door, even though it has settled as one of the pillars of history, has little foundation in truth. The story is based on comments made by Philipp Melanchthon, though it is thought that he was not in Wittenberg at the time.

It was not until January 1518 that friends of Luther translated the ''95 Theses'' from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press. Within two weeks, copies of the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe.

Luther's writings circulated widely, reaching France, England, and Italy as early as 1519. Students thronged to Wittenberg to hear Luther speak. He published a short commentary on Galatians and his ''Work on the Psalms''. This early part of Luther's career was one of his most creative and productive. Three of his best-known works were published in 1520: ''To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation'', ''On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church'', and ''On the Freedom of a Christian''.

Justification by faith

From 1510 to 1520, Luther lectured on the Psalms, the books of Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians. As he studied these portions of the Bible, he came to view the use of terms such as penance and righteousness by the Catholic Church in new ways. He became convinced that the church was corrupt in its ways and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity. The most important for Luther was the doctrine of justification – God's act of declaring a sinner righteous – by faith alone through God's grace. He began to teach that salvation or redemption is a gift of God's grace, attainable only through faith in Jesus as the Messiah. "This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification," he wrote, "is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness."

Luther came to understand justification as entirely the work of God. This teaching by Luther was clearly expressed in his 1525 publication ''On the Bondage of the Will'', which was written in response to ''On Free Will'' by Desiderius Erasmus (1524). Luther based his position on Predestination on St. Paul's epistle to the . Against the teaching of his day that the righteous acts of believers are performed in ''cooperation'' with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually ''is'' the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians (rather than infused into them) through faith. "That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law," he wrote. "Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ." Faith, for Luther, was a gift from God; the experience of being justified by faith was "as though I had been born again." His entry into Paradise, no less, was a discovery about "the righteousness of God" – a discovery that "the just person" of whom the Bible speaks (as in Romans 1:17) lives by faith. He explained his concept of "justification" in the Smalcald Articles:

The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24–25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us ... Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).

Breach with the papacy

Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg did not reply to Luther's letter containing the 95 Theses. He had the theses checked for heresy and in December 1517 forwarded them to Rome. He needed the revenue from the indulgences to pay off a papal dispensation for his tenure of more than one bishopric. As Luther later noted, "the pope had a finger in the pie as well, because one half was to go to the building of St Peter's Church in Rome".

Pope Leo X was used to reformers and heretics, and he responded slowly, "with great care as is proper." Over the next three years he deployed a series of papal theologians and envoys against Luther, which only served to harden the reformer's anti-papal theology. First, the Dominican theologian Sylvester Mazzolini drafted a heresy case against Luther, whom Leo then summoned to Rome. The Elector Frederick persuaded the pope to have Luther examined at Augsburg, where the Imperial Diet was held. There, in October 1518, Luther informed the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan that he did not consider the papacy part of the biblical Church, and the hearings degenerated into a shouting match. More than his writing the 95 Theses, Luther's confrontation of the church cast him as an enemy of the pope. Cajetan's original instructions had been to arrest Luther if he failed to recant, but he lacked the means in Augsburg, where the Elector guaranteed Luther's security. Luther slipped out of the city at night, without leave from Cajetan. In January 1519, at Altenburg in Saxony, the papal ''nuncio'' Karl von Miltitz adopted a more conciliatory approach. Luther made certain concessions to the Saxon, who was a relative of the Elector, and promised to remain silent if his opponents did. The theologian Johann Maier von Eck, however, was determined to expose Luther's doctrine in a public forum. In June and July 1519, he staged a disputation with Luther's colleague Andreas Karlstadt at Leipzig and invited Luther to speak. Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 does not confer on popes the exclusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were infallible. For this, Eck branded Luther a new Jan Hus, referring to the Czech reformer and heretic burned at the stake in 1415. From that moment, he devoted himself to Luther's defeat.

Excommunication

On 15 June 1520, the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull (edict) ''Exsurge Domine'' that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the 95 Theses, within 60 days. That autumn, Johann Eck proclaimed the bull in Meissen and other towns. Karl von Miltitz, a papal nuncio, attempted to broker a solution, but Luther, who had sent the Pope a copy of ''On the Freedom of a Christian'' in October, publicly set fire to the bull and decretals at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520, an act he defended in ''Why the Pope and his Recent Book are Burned'' and ''Assertions Concerning All Articles''. As a consequence, Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X on 3 January 1521, in the bull ''Decet Romanum Pontificem''.

Diet of Worms

The enforcement of the ban on the 95 Theses fell to the secular authorities. On 18 April 1521, Luther appeared as ordered before the Diet of Worms. This was a general assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire that took place in Worms, a town on the Rhine. It was conducted from 28 January to 25 May 1521, with Emperor Charles V presiding. Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, obtained a safe conduct for Luther to and from the meeting.

Johann Eck, speaking on behalf of the Empire as assistant of the Archbishop of Trier, presented Luther with copies of his writings laid out on a table and asked him if the books were his, and whether he stood by their contents. Luther confirmed he was their author, but requested time to think about the answer to the second question. He prayed, consulted friends, and gave his response the next day:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

Luther is sometimes also quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable, since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings.

Over the next five days, private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate. The Emperor presented the final draft of the Diet of Worms on 25 May 1521, declaring Luther an outlaw, banning his literature, and requiring his arrest: "We want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic." It also made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give Luther food or shelter. It permitted anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence.

At Wartburg Castle

Luther's disappearance during his return trip was planned. Frederick III, Elector of Saxony had him intercepted on his way home by masked horsemen and escorted to the security of the Wartburg Castle at Eisenach. During his stay at Wartburg, which he referred to as "my Patmos", Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German and poured out doctrinal and polemical writings. These included a renewed attack on Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, whom he shamed into halting the sale of indulgences in his episcopates, and a "Refutation of the Argument of Latomus," in which he expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus, an orthodox theologian from Louvain.

In this work, one of his most emphatic statements on faith, he argued that every good work designed to attract God's favor is a sin. All humans are sinners by nature, he explained, and God's grace, which cannot be earned, alone can make them just. On 1 August 1521, Luther wrote to Melanchthon on the same theme: "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides."

In the summer of 1521, Luther widened his target from individual pieties like indulgences and pilgrimages to doctrines at the heart of Church practices. In ''On the Abrogation of the Private Mass'', he condemned as idolatry the idea that the mass is a sacrifice, asserting instead that it is a gift, to be received with thanksgiving by the whole congregation. His essay ''On Confession, Whether the Pope has the Power to Require It'' rejected compulsory confession and encouraged private confession and absolution, since "every Christian is a confessor." In November, Luther wrote ''The Judgement of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows''. He assured monks and nuns that they could break their vows without sin, because vows were an illegitimate and vain attempt to win salvation.

Luther made his pronouncements from Wartburg in the context of rapid developments at Wittenberg, of which he was kept fully informed. Andreas Karlstadt, supported by the ex-Augustinian Gabriel Zwilling, embarked on a radical programme of reform there in June 1521, exceeding anything envisaged by Luther. The reforms provoked disturbances, including a revolt by the Augustinian monks against their prior, the smashing of statues and images in churches, and denunciations of the magistracy. After secretly visiting Wittenberg in early December 1521, Luther wrote ''A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion''. Wittenberg became even more volatile after Christmas when a band of visionary zealots, the so-called Zwickau prophets, arrived, preaching revolutionary doctrines such as the equality of man, adult baptism, and Christ's imminent return. When the town council asked Luther to return, he decided it was his duty to act.

Return to Wittenberg

Luther secretly returned to Wittenberg on 6 March 1522. "During my absence," he wrote to the Elector, "Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word." For eight days in Lent, beginning on ''Invocavit'' Sunday, 9 March, Luther preached eight sermons, which became known as the "Invocavit Sermons." In these sermons, he hammered home the primacy of core Christian values such as love, patience, charity, and freedom, and reminded the citizens to trust God's word rather than violence to bring about necessary change.

Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: "Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it." But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear.

The effect of Luther's intervention was immediate. After the sixth sermon, the Wittenberg jurist Jerome Schurf wrote to the elector: "Oh, what joy has Dr. Martin’s return spread among us! His words, through divine mercy, are bringing back every day misguided people into the way of the truth."

Luther next set about reversing or modifying the new church practices. By working alongside the authorities to restore public order, he signalled his reinvention as a conservative force within the Reformation. After banishing the Zwickau prophets, he now faced a battle not only against the established Church but against radical reformers who threatened the new order by fomenting social unrest and violence.

Peasants' War

Despite his victory in Wittenberg, Luther was unable to stifle radicalism further afield. Preachers such as Zwickau prophet Nicholas Storch and Thomas Müntzer helped instigate the German Peasants' War of 1524–25, during which many atrocities were committed, often in Luther's name. There had been revolts by the peasantry on a smaller scale since the 15th century. Luther's pamphlets against the Church and the hierarchy, often worded with "liberal" phraseology, now led many peasants to believe he would support an attack on the upper classes in general. Revolts broke out in Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia in 1524, even drawing support from disaffected nobles, many of whom were in debt. Gaining momentum under the leadership of radicals such as Müntzer in Thuringia and Michael Gaismair in Tyrol, the revolts turned into war.

Luther sympathised with some of the peasants' grievances, as he showed in his response to the Twelve Articles in May 1525, but he reminded the aggrieved to obey the temporal authorities. During a tour of Thuringia, he became enraged at the widespread burning of convents, monasteries, bishops’ palaces, and libraries. In ''Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants'', written on his return to Wittenberg, he explained the Gospel teaching on wealth, condemned the violence as the devil's work, and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs:

Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel ... For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul; and the gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their own free will, do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4 [:32–37]. They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of Pilate and Herod—should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.

Luther justified his opposition to the rebels on three grounds. First, in choosing violence over lawful submission to the secular government, they were ignoring Christ's counsel to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"; St. Paul had written in his epistle to the that all authorities are appointed by God and therefore should not be resisted. This reference from the Bible forms the foundation for the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings, or, in the German case, the divine right of the princes. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire," so they deserved "death in body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the banner of the Gospel.

Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their weapons; others felt betrayed. Their defeat by the Swabian League at the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, followed by Müntzer’s execution, brought the revolutionary stage of the Reformation to a close. Thereafter, radicalism found a refuge in the anabaptist movement and other sects, while Luther's Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers.

Marriage

Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts," he wrote to Wenceslaus Link, "the Lord has plunged me into marriage." Katherina was 26 years old, Luther was 41 years old.

On 13 June 1525, the couple was engaged with Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Johannes Apel, Philipp Melanchthon and Lucas Cranach the Elder and his wife as witnesses. On the evening of the same day, the couple was married by Bugenhagen. The ceremonial walk to the church and the wedding banquet were left out, and were made up two weeks later on 27 June.

Some priests and former monks had already married, including Andreas Karlstadt and Justus Jonas, but Luther's wedding set the seal of approval on clerical marriage. He had long condemned vows of celibacy on Biblical grounds, but his decision to marry surprised many, not least Melanchthon, who called it reckless. Luther had written to George Spalatin on 30 November 1524, "I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic." Before marrying, Luther had been living on the plainest food, and, as he admitted himself, his mildewed bed was not properly made for months at a time.

Luther and his wife moved into a former monastery, "The Black Cloister," a wedding present from the new elector John the Steadfast (1525–32). They embarked on what appeared to have been a happy and successful marriage, though money was often short. Between bearing six children, Hans – June 1526, Elizabeth – 10 December 1527 died within a few months, Magdalene – 1529 died in Luther's arms in 1542, Martin – 1531, Paul – January 1533, and Margaret – 1534, Katharina helped earn the couple a living by farming the land and taking in boarders. Luther confided to Michael Stiefel on 11 August 1526: "My Katie is in all things so obliging and pleasing to me that I would not exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus."

Organising the church

By 1526, Luther found himself increasingly occupied in organising a new church. His Biblical ideal of congregations' choosing their own ministers had proved unworkable. According to Bainton: "Luther's dilemma was that he wanted both a confessional church based on personal faith and experience and a territorial church including all in a given locality. If he were forced to choose, he would take his stand with the masses, and this was the direction in which he moved." From 1525 to 1529, he established a supervisory church body, laid down a new form of worship service, and wrote a clear summary of the new faith in the form of two catechisms.

To avoid confusing or upsetting the people, Luther avoided extreme change. He also did not wish to replace one controlling system with another. He concentrated on the church in the Electorate of Saxony, acting only as an adviser to churches in new territories, many of which followed his Saxon model. He worked closely with the new elector, John the Steadfast, to whom he turned for secular leadership and funds on behalf of a church largely shorn of its assets and income after the break with Rome. For Luther's biographer Martin Brecht, this partnership "was the beginning of a questionable and originally unintended development towards a church government under the temporal sovereign". The elector authorised a visitation of the church, a power formerly exercised by bishops. At times, Luther's practical reforms fell short of his earlier radical pronouncements. For example, the ''Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony'' (1528), drafted by Melanchthon with Luther's approval, stressed the role of repentance in the forgiveness of sins, despite Luther's position that faith alone ensures justification. The Eisleben reformer Johannes Agricola challenged this compromise, and Luther condemned him for teaching that faith is separate from works. The ''Instruction'' is a problematic document for those seeking a consistent evolution in Luther's thought and practice.

In response to demands for a German liturgy, Luther wrote a ''German Mass'', which he published in early 1526. He did not intend it as a replacement for his 1523 adaptation of the Latin Mass but as an alternative for the "simple people", a "public stimulation for people to believe and become Christians." Luther based his order on the Catholic service but omitted "everything that smacks of sacrifice"; and the Mass became a celebration where everyone received the wine as well as the bread. He retained the elevation of the host and chalice, while trappings such as the Mass vestments, altar, and candles were made optional, allowing freedom of ceremony. Some reformers, including followers of Huldrych Zwingli, considered Luther's service too papistic; and modern scholars note the conservatism of his alternative to the Catholic mass. Luther's service, however, included congregational singing of hymns and psalms in German, as well as of parts of the liturgy, including Luther's unison setting of the Creed. To reach the simple people and the young, Luther incorporated religious instruction into the weekday services in the form of the catechism. He also provided simplified versions of the baptism and marriage services.

Luther and his colleagues introduced the new order of worship during their visitation of Electoral Saxony, which began in 1527. They also assessed the standard of pastoral care and Christian education in the territory. "Merciful God, what misery I have seen," Luther wrote, "the common people knowing nothing at all of Christian doctrine ... and unfortunately many pastors are well-nigh unskilled and incapable of teaching."

Catechisms

Luther devised the catechism as a method of imparting the basics of Christianity to the congregations. In 1529, he wrote the ''Large Catechism'', a manual for pastors and teachers, as well as a synopsis, the ''Small Catechism'', to be memorised by the people themselves. The catechisms provided easy-to-understand instructional and devotional material on the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, baptism, and the Lord's Supper. Luther incorporated questions and answers in the catechism so that the basics of Christian faith would not just be learned by rote, "the way monkeys do it", but understood.

The catechism is one of Luther's most personal works. "Regarding the plan to collect my writings in volumes," he wrote, "I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the ''Bondage of the Will'' and the Catechism." The ''Small Catechism'' has earned a reputation as a model of clear religious teaching. It remains in use today, along with Luther's hymns and his translation of the Bible.

Luther's ''Small Catechism'' proved especially effective in helping parents teach their children; likewise the ''Larger Catechism'' was effective for pastors. Using the German vernacular they expressed the Apostles' Creed in simpler, more personal, Trinitarian language. He rewrote each article of the Creed to express the character of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Luther's goal was to enable the catechumens to see themselves as a personal object of the work of the three persons of the Trinity, each of which works in the catechumen's life. That is, Luther depicted the Trinity not as a doctrine to be learned, but as persons to be known. The Father creates, the Son redeems, and the Spirit sanctifies, a divine unity with separate personalities. Salvation originates with the Father and draws the believer to the Father. Luther's treatment of the Apostles Creed must be understood in the context of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) and the Lord's Prayer, which are also part of the Lutheran catechical teaching.

Translation of the Bible

Luther had published his German translation of the New Testament in 1522, and he and his collaborators completed the translation of the Old Testament in 1534, when the whole Bible was published. He continued to work on refining the translation until the end of his life. Others had translated the Bible into German, but Luther tailored his translation to his own doctrine. When he was criticised for inserting the word "alone" after "faith" in Romans 3:28, he replied in part: "[T]he text itself and the meaning of St. Paul urgently require and demand it. For in that very passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law . . . But when works are so completely cut away – and that must mean that faith alone justifies – whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this cutting away of works will have to say, 'Faith alone justifies us, and not works'."

Luther's translation used the variant of German spoken at the Saxon chancellery, intelligible to both northern and southern Germans. He intended his vigorous, direct language to make the Bible accessible to everyday Germans, "for we are removing impediments and difficulties so that other people may read it without hindrance."

Published at a time of rising demand for German-language publications, Luther's version quickly became a popular and influential Bible translation. As such, it made a significant contribution to the evolution of the German language and literature. Furnished with notes and prefaces by Luther, and with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach that contained anti-papal imagery, it played a major role in the spread of Luther's doctrine throughout Germany. The Luther Bible influenced other vernacular translations, such as William Tyndale's English Bible (1525 forward), a precursor of the King James Bible.

Hymns

Luther was a prolific hymn writer, authoring hymns such as ''Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott'' (''A Mighty Fortress Is Our God''), based on Psalm 46. Luther connected high art and folk music, also all classes, clergy and laity, men, women and children. His device for this linking was the singing of German hymns in connection with worship, school, home, and the public arena.

Luther's 1524 creedal hymn ''Wir glauben all an einen Gott'' (''We All Believe in One True God'') is a three-stanza confession of faith prefiguring Luther's 1529 three-part explanation of the Apostles' Creed in the ''Small Catechism.'' Luther's hymn, adapted and expanded from an earlier German creedal hymn, gained widespread use in vernacular Lutheran liturgies as early as 1525. Sixteenth-century Lutheran hymnals also included ''Wir glauben all'' among the catechetical hymns, although 18th-century hymnals tended to label the hymn as Trinitarian rather than catechetical, and 20th-century Lutherans rarely use the hymn because of the perceived difficulty of its tune.

Luther's 1538 hymnic version of the Lord's Prayer, ''Vater unser im Himmelreich'', corresponds exactly to Luther's explanation of the prayer in the ''Small Catechism,'' with one stanza for each of the seven prayer petitions, plus opening and closing stanzas. The hymn functioned both as a liturgical setting of the Lord's Prayer and as a means of examining candidates on specific catechism questions. The extant manuscript shows multiple revisions, demonstrating Luther's concern to clarify and strengthen the text and to provide an appropriately prayerful tune. Other 16th- and 20th-century versifications of the Lord's Prayer have adopted Luther's tune, although modern texts are considerably shorter.

Luther wrote ''Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir'' (''From depths of woe I cry to you'') in 1523 as a hymnic version of Psalm 130 and sent it as a sample to encourage evangelical colleagues to write psalm-hymns for use in German worship. In a collaboration with Paul Speratus, this and seven more hymns were published in the first Lutheran hymnal, also called Achtliederbuch. In 1524 Luther developed his original four-stanza psalm paraphrase into a five-stanza Reformation hymn that developed the theme of "grace alone" more fully. Because it expressed essential Reformation doctrine, this expanded version of ''Aus tiefer Not'' was designated as a regular component of several regional Lutheran liturgies and was widely used at funerals, including Luther's own. Along with Erhart Hegenwalt's hymnic version of Psalm 51, Luther's expanded hymn was also adopted for use with the fifth part of Luther's catechism, concerning confession.

Luther's 1540 hymn ''Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam'' (''To Jordan came the Christ our Lord'') reflects the structure and substance of his questions and answers concerning baptism in the ''Small Catechism.'' Luther adopted a preexisting Johann Walter tune associated with a hymnic setting of Psalm 67's prayer for grace; Wolf Heintz's four-part setting of the hymn was used to introduce the Lutheran Reformation in Halle in 1541. Preachers and composers of the 18th century, including J. S. Bach, used this rich hymn as a subject for their own work, although its objective baptismal theology was displaced by more subjective hymns under the influence of late-19th-century Lutheran pietism.

Luther wrote ''Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein'' (''Oh God, look down from heaven''). He wrote ''Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland'' (''Now come, Savior of the gentiles'') based on ''Veni redemptor gentium''. It became the main hymn (Hauptlied) for Advent. He transformed ''A solus ortus cardine'' to ''Christum wir sollen loben schon'' (''We should now praise Christ'') and ''Veni creator spiritus'' to ''Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist'' (''Come, Holy Spirit, Lord God''). He wrote two hymns on the Ten Commandments, ''Dies sind die heilgen Zehn Gebot'' and ''Mensch, willst du leben seliglich''. His ''Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ'' (''Praise be to You, Jesus Christ'') became the main hymn for Christmas. He wrote for Pentecost ''Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist'' and for Easter ''Christ ist erstanden'' (Christ is risen), based on ''Victimae paschali laudes''.

Luther's hymns inspired composers to write music. Johann Sebastian Bach included several verses as chorales in his cantatas and based chorale cantatas entirely on them, namely ''Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4'', as early as possibly 1707, in his second annual cycle (1724 to 1725) ''Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein, BWV 2'', ''Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, BWV 7'', ''Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 62'', ''Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 91'', and ''Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 38'', later ''Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80'', and in 1735 ''Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit, BWV 14''.

Sacramentarian controversy and the Marburg Colloquy

In October 1529, Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse convoked an assembly of German and Swiss theologians at the Marburg Colloquy, to establish doctrinal unity in the emerging Protestant states. Agreement was achieved on fourteen points out of fifteen, the exception being the nature of the Eucharist – the sacrament of the Lord's Supper—an issue crucial to Luther.

The theologians, including Zwingli, Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, and Johannes Oecolampadius, differed on the significance of the words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper: "This is my body which is for you" and "This cup is the new covenant in my blood" (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). Luther insisted on the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, which he called the sacramental union, while his opponents believed God to be only spiritually or symbolically present. Zwingli, for example, denied Jesus's ability to be in more than one place at a time but Luther stressed the omnipresence of his human nature. According to transcripts, the debate sometimes became confrontational. Citing Jesus's words "The flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6.63), Zwingli said, "This passage breaks your neck". "Don't be too proud," Luther retorted, "German necks don't break that easily. This is Hesse, not Switzerland." On his table Luther wrote the words "''Hoc est corpus meum''" ("This is my body") in chalk, to continually indicate his firm stance.

Despite the disagreements on the Eucharist, the Marburg Colloquy paved the way for the signing in 1530 of the Augsburg Confession, and for the formation of the Schmalkaldic League the following year by leading Protestant nobles such as John of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, and George, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The Swiss cities, however, did not sign these agreements.

On the soul after death

In contrast to the views of Calvin and Melanchthon, throughout his life Luther maintained that it was not false doctrine to believe that a Christian's soul sleeps after it is separated from the body in death; and, accordingly, he disputed traditional interpretations of some Bible passages, such as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. This also led Luther to reject the idea of torments for the saints: "It is enough for us to know that souls do not leave their bodies to be threatened by the torments and punishments of hell, but enter a prepared bedchamber in which they sleep in peace." Luther also affirmed the continuity of one's personal identity beyond death. In his Smalcald Articles he described the saints as currently residing "in their graves and in heaven."

The Lutheran theologian Franz Pieper observed that Luther's apparent teaching of "soul sleep" (German ''Seelenschlaf'') differed from the later Lutheran theologians such as Johann Gerhard. Lessing (1755) had earlier reached the same conclusion in his analysis of Lutheran Orthodoxy on this issue.

Luther's ''Commentary on Genesis'' contains a passage which concludes "...the soul does not sleep (''anima non sic dormit''), but wakes (''sed vigilat'') and experiences visions". Francis Blackburne in 1765 argued that John Jortin misread this and other passages from Luther, while Gottfried Fritschel pointed out in 1867 that it actually refers to the soul of a man "in this life" (''homo enim in hac vita'') tired from his daily labour (''defatigus diurno labore'') who at night enters his bedchamber (''sub noctem intrat in cubiculum suum'') and whose sleep is interrupted by dreams.

Henry Eyster Jacobs' English translation from 1898 reads: :"Nevertheless, the sleep of this life and that of the future life differ; for in this life, man, fatigued by his daily labour, at nightfall goes to his couch, as in peace, to sleep there, and enjoys rest; nor does he know anything of evil, whether of fire or of murder."

On Islam

At the time of the Marburg Colloquy, Suleiman the Magnificent was besieging Vienna with a vast Ottoman army. Luther had argued against resisting the Turks in his 1518 ''Explanation of the Ninety-five Theses'', provoking accusations of defeatism. He saw the Turks as a scourge sent to punish Christians by God, as agents of the Biblical apocalypse that would destroy the antichrist, whom Luther believed to be the papacy, and the Roman Church. He consistently rejected the idea of a Holy War, "as though our people were an army of Christians against the Turks, who were enemies of Christ. This is absolutely contrary to Christ's doctrine and name". On the other hand, in keeping with his doctrine of the two kingdoms, Luther did support non-religious war against the Turks. In 1526, he argued in ''Whether Soldiers can be in a State of Grace'' that national defence is reason for a just war. By 1529, in ''On War against the Turk'', he was actively urging Emperor Charles V and the German people to fight a secular war against the Turks. He made clear, however, that the spiritual war against an alien faith was separate, to be waged through prayer and repentance. Around the time of the Siege of Vienna, Luther wrote a prayer for national deliverance from the Turks, asking God to "give to our emperor perpetual victory over our enemies".

In 1542, Luther read a Latin translation of the Qur'an. He went on to produce several critical pamphlets on Islam, which he called "Mohammedanism" or "the Turk". Though Luther saw the Muslim faith as a tool of the devil, he was indifferent to its practice: ''"Let the Turk believe and live as he will, just as one lets the papacy and other false Christians live."'' He opposed banning the publication of the Qur'an, wanting it exposed to scrutiny.

Augsburg Confession

Shaken by the Siege of Vienna, Charles V convened the Imperial Diet at Augsburg in 1530, aiming to unite the empire against the Turks. To achieve this, he needed first to resolve the religious controversies in his lands, "considering with love and kindness the views of everybody". He asked for a statement of the evangelical case, and one was duly devised by Luther, Melanchthon, and their colleagues at Wittenberg. Melanchthon drafted the document, known as the Augsburg Confession, and travelled with the elector's party to Augsburg, where it was read to the emperor and diet on 25 June 1530. (Luther was left behind at the Coburg fortress in southern Saxony because he remained under the imperial ban and lacked a safe-conduct to attend the diet.) Luther's writings during his 165 days at Coburg, including the ''Exhortation to all Clergy Assembled at Augsburg'', show that, unlike Melanchthon, he was set against making concessions.

Despite the Confession's avoidance of strident language or abuse of the pope, the diet rejected it on 22 September and ordered the reformers to renounce heresy and submit to the control of the Roman Catholic Church by the following April or face the imperial army. That decision confirmed Luther's belief that the mission had been futile. It prompted the Lutheran princes to form a military alliance, the Schmalkaldic League, which Luther cautiously supported on grounds of self-defence in his ''Warning to His Dear German People'' of 1531. The Augsburg Confession had become the statement of faith on which Lutherans were prepared to stand or fall. Though a modification of Luther's own position, it nevertheless is regarded as the first Lutheran treatise.

Depiction of Luther

In the 1530s and 1540s, printed images of Luther that emphasized his monumental size were crucial to the spread of Protestantism. In contrast to images of frail Catholic saints, Luther was presented as a stout man with a "double chin, strong mouth, piercing deep-set eyes, fleshy face, and squat neck." He was shown to be physically imposing, an equal in stature to the secular German princes with whom he would join forces to spread Lutheranism. His large body also let the viewer know that he did not shun earthly pleasures like drinking or conjugal relations with his wife—behavior that was a stark contrast to the ascetic life of the medieval religious orders. Famous images from this period include the woodcuts by Hans Brosamer (1530) and Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger (1546).

Antinomian controversy

Early in 1537, Johannes Agricola (1494–1566) – serving at the time as pastor in Luther's birthplace, Eisleben – preached a sermon in which he claimed that God's gospel, not God's moral law (the Ten Commandments), revealed God's wrath to Christians. Based on this sermon and others by Agricola, Luther suspected that Agricola was behind certain anonymous antinomian theses circulating in Wittenberg. These theses asserted that the law is no longer to be taught to Christians but belonged only to city hall. Luther responded to these theses with six series of theses against Agricola and the antinomians, four of which became the basis for disputations between 1538 and 1540. He also responded to these assertions in other writings, such as his 1539 open letter to C. Güttel ''Against the Antinomians'', and his book ''On the Councils and the Church'' from the same year.

In his theses and disputations against the antinomians, Luther reviews and reaffirms, on the one hand, what has been called the "second use of the law," that is, the law as the Holy Spirit's tool to work sorrow over sin in man's heart, thus preparing him for Christ's fulfillment of the law offered in the gospel. Luther states that everything that is used to work sorrow over sin is called the law, even if it is Christ's life, Christ's death for sin, or God's goodness experienced in creation. Simply refusing to preach the Ten Commandments among Christians – thereby, as it were, removing the three letters l-a-w from the church – does not eliminate the accusing law. Claiming that the law – in any form – should not be preached to Christians anymore would be tantamount to asserting that Christians are no longer sinners in themselves and that the church consists only of essentially holy people.

On the other hand, Luther also points out that the Ten Commandments – when considered not as God's condemning judgment but as an expression of his eternal will, that is, of the natural law – also positively teach how the Christian ought to live. This has traditionally been called the "third use of the law." For Luther, also Christ's life, when understood as an example, is nothing more than an illustration of the Ten Commandments, which a Christian should follow in his or her vocations on a daily basis.

The Ten Commandments, and the beginnings of the renewed life of Christians accorded to them by the sacrament of baptism, are a present foreshadowing of the believers' future angel-like life in heaven in the midst of this life. Luther's teaching of the Ten Commandments, therefore, has clear eschatological overtones, which, characteristically for Luther, do not encourage world-flight but direct the Christian to service to the neighbor in the common, daily vocations of this perishing world.

In the 20th century, there have been attempts to show that the "third use of the law" was a typical "Reformed" doctrine and that Luther himself never taught this, but in light of Luther's disputations against the antinomians and other texts, this position cannot be maintained.

Bigamy of Philip of Hesse

From December 1539, Luther became implicated in the bigamy of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, who wanted to marry one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting. Philip solicited the approval of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer, citing as a precedent the polygamy of the patriarchs. The theologians were not prepared to make a general ruling, and they reluctantly advised the landgrave that if he was determined, he should marry secretly and keep quiet about the matter. As a result, on 4 March 1540, Philip married a second wife, Margarethe von der Sale, with Melanchthon and Bucer among the witnesses. However, Philip was unable to keep the marriage secret, and he threatened to make Luther's advice public. Luther told him to "tell a good, strong lie" and deny the marriage completely, which Philip did during the subsequent public controversy. In the view of Luther's biographer Martin Brecht, "giving confessional advice for Philip of Hesse was one of the worst mistakes Luther made, and, next to the landgrave himself, who was directly responsible for it, history chiefly holds Luther accountable". Brecht argues that Luther's mistake was not that he gave private pastoral advice, but that he miscalculated the political implications. The affair caused lasting damage to Luther's reputation.

Anti-Judaism and antisemitism

Luther wrote about the Jews throughout his career, though only a few of his works dealt with them directly. Luther rarely encountered Jews during his life, but his attitudes reflected a theological and cultural tradition which saw Jews as a rejected people guilty of the murder of Christ, and he lived within a local community that had expelled Jews some ninety years earlier. He considered the Jews blasphemers and liars because they rejected the divinity of Jesus, whereas Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah. At the same time, Luther believed that all human beings who set themselves against God shared one and the same guilt. As early as 1516, Luther wrote, "...[M]any people are proud with marvelous stupidity when they call the Jews dogs, evildoers, or whatever they like, while they too, and equally, do not realize who or what they are in the sight of God". In 1523, Luther advised kindness toward the Jews in ''That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew'', but only with the aim of converting them to Christianity. When his efforts at conversion failed, he grew increasingly bitter toward them.

Luther's other major works on the Jews were his 60,000-word treatise ''Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen'' (''On the Jews and Their Lies''), and ''Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi'' (''On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ''), both published in 1543, three years before his death. Luther argued that the Jews were no longer the chosen people but "the devil's people": he referred to them with violent, vile language. Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews' property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these "poisonous envenomed worms" would be forced into labour or expelled "for all time". In Robert Michael's view, Luther's words "We are at fault in not slaying them" amounted to a sanction for murder. Luther's "recommendations" for how to treat the Jews was a clear reference to the "sharp mercy" of Deuteronomy 13, the punishments prescribed ''by Moses'' for those who led others to "false gods".

Luther spoke out against the Jews in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Silesia. Josel of Rosheim, the Jewish spokesman who tried to help the Jews of Saxony in 1537, later blamed their plight on "that priest whose name was Martin Luther—may his body and soul be bound up in hell!—who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition." Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther's anti-Jewish works: they refused initially, but relented when a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden used a sermon to urge his parishioners to murder Jews.

Luther was the most widely read author of his generation, and he acquired the status of a prophet within Germany. According to the prevailing view among historians, his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of antisemitism in Germany, and in the 1930s and 1940s provided an "ideal underpinning" for the National Socialists' attacks on Jews. Reinhold Lewin writes that "whoever wrote against the Jews for whatever reason believed he had the right to justify himself by triumphantly referring to Luther." According to Michael, just about every anti-Jewish book printed in the Third Reich contained references to and quotations from Luther. Heinrich Himmler wrote admiringly of his writings and sermons on the Jews in 1940. The city of Nuremberg presented a first edition of ''On the Jews and their Lies'' to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper ''Der Stürmer'', on his birthday in 1937; the newspaper described it as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published. It was publicly exhibited in a glass case at the Nuremberg rallies and quoted in a 54-page explanation of the Aryan Law by Dr. E.H. Schulz and Dr. R. Frercks. On 17 December 1941, seven Protestant regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge, "since after his bitter experience Luther had already suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory." According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Luther's writings shortly after Kristallnacht, for which Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford argued that Luther's writing was a "blueprint." Sasse applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, "On 10 November 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews." According to Professor Dick Geary, the Nazis won a larger share of the vote in Protestant than in Catholic areas of Germany in elections of 1928 to November 1932.

At the heart of scholars' debate about Luther's influence is whether it is anachronistic to view his work as a precursor of the racial antisemitism of the National Socialists. Some scholars see Luther's influence as limited, and the Nazis' use of his work as opportunistic. Biographer Martin Brecht points out that "There is a world of difference between his belief in salvation and a racial ideology. Nevertheless, his misguided agitation had the evil result that Luther fatefully became one of the 'church fathers' of anti-Semitism and thus provided material for the modern hatred of the Jews, cloaking it with the authority of the Reformer." Johannes Wallmann argues that Luther's writings against the Jews were largely ignored in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that there was no continuity between Luther's thought and Nazi ideology. Uwe Siemon-Netto agreed, arguing that it was because the Nazis were already anti-Semites that they revived Luther's work. Hans J. Hillerbrand agreed that to focus on Luther was to adopt an essentially ahistorical perspective of Nazi antisemitism that ignored other contributory factors in German history. Similarly, Roland Bainton, noted church historian and Luther biographer, wrote "One could wish that Luther had died before ever [''On the Jews and Their Lies''] was written. His position was entirely religious and in no respect racial."

Other scholars argue that, even if his views were merely anti-Judaic, their violence lent a new element to the standard Christian suspicion of Judaism. Ronald Berger writes that Luther is credited with "Germanizing the Christian critique of Judaism and establishing anti-Semitism as a key element of German culture and national identity." Paul Rose argues that he caused a "hysterical and demonizing mentality" about Jews to enter German thought and discourse, a mentality that might otherwise have been absent.

Since the 1980s, Lutheran Church denominations have repudiated Martin Luther's statements against the Jews and have rejected the use of them to incite hatred against Lutherans.

Final years and death

Luther had been suffering from ill health for years, including Ménière's disease, vertigo, fainting, tinnitus, and a cataract in one eye. From 1531 to 1546, his health deteriorated further. The years of struggle with Rome, the antagonisms with and among his fellow reformers, and the scandal which ensued from the bigamy of the Philip of Hesse incident, in which Luther had played a leading role, all may have contributed. In 1536, he began to suffer from kidney and bladder stones, and arthritis, and an ear infection ruptured an ear drum. In December 1544, he began to feel the effects of angina.

His poor physical health made him short-tempered and even harsher in his writings and comments. His wife Katharina was overheard saying, "Dear husband, you are too rude," and he responded, "They are teaching me to be rude." In 1545 and 1546 Luther preached three times in the Market Church in Halle, staying with his friend Justus Jonas during Christmas.

His last sermon was delivered at Eisleben, his place of birth, on 15 February 1546, three days before his death. It was "entirely devoted to the obdurate Jews, whom it was a matter of great urgency to expel from all German territory," according to Léon Poliakov. James Mackinnon writes that it concluded with a "fiery summons to drive the Jews bag and baggage from their midst, unless they desisted from their calumny and their usury and became Christians." Luther said, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert," but also that they are "our public enemies ... and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And so often they do."

Luther's final journey, to Mansfeld, was taken because of his concern for his siblings' families continuing in their father Hans Luther's copper mining trade. Their livelihood was threatened by Count Albrecht of Mansfeld bringing the industry under his own control. The controversy that ensued involved all four Mansfeld counts: Albrecht, Philip, John George, and Gerhard. Luther journeyed to Mansfeld twice in late 1545 to participate in the negotiations for a settlement, and a third visit was needed in early 1546 for their completion.

The negotiations were successfully concluded on 17 February 1546. After 8:00 pm, he experienced chest pains. When he went to his bed, he prayed, "Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God" (Ps. 31:5), the common prayer of the dying. At 1:00 am he awoke with more chest pain and was warmed with hot towels. He thanked God for revealing his Son to him in whom he had believed. His companions, Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, shouted loudly, "Reverend father, are you ready to die trusting in your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught in his name?" A distinct "Yes" was Luther's reply.

An apoplectic stroke deprived him of his speech, and he died shortly afterwards at 2:45 am on 18 February 1546, aged 62, in Eisleben, the city of his birth. He was buried in the Castle Church in Wittenberg, beneath the pulpit. The funeral was held by his friends Johannes Bugenhagen and Philipp Melanchthon. A year later, troops of Luther's adversary Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor entered the town, but were ordered by Charles not to disturb the grave.

A piece of paper was later found on which Luther had written his last statement. The statement was in Latin, apart from "We are beggars," which was in German.

1. No one can understand Virgil's Bucolics unless he has been a shepherd for five years. No one can understand Virgil's Georgics, unless he has been a farmer for five years.

2. No one can understand Cicero's Letters (or so I teach), unless he has busied himself in the affairs of some prominent state for twenty years.

3. Know that no one can have indulged in the Holy Writers sufficiently, unless he has governed churches for a hundred years with the prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, John the Baptist, Christ and the apostles.

Do not assail this divine Aeneid; nay, rather prostrate revere the ground that it treads.

We are beggars: this is true.

Luther is honoured on 18 February with a commemoration in the Lutheran Calendar of Saints and a feast day in the Episcopal (United States) Calendar of Saints; in the Church of England's Calendar of Saints he is commemorated on 31 October.

Works and editions

The Erlangen Edition (''Erlangener Ausgabe'': "EA"), comprising the ''Exegetica opera latina'' – Latin exegetical works of Luther.

The Weimar Edition (Weimarer Ausgabe) is the exhaustive, standard German edition of Luther's Latin and German works, indicated by the abbreviation "WA". This is continued into "WA Br" ''Weimarer Ausgabe, Briefwechsel'' (correspondence), "WA Tr" ''Weimarer Ausgabe, Tischreden'' (tabletalk) and "WA DB" ''Weimarer Ausgabe, Deutsche Bibel'' (German Bible).

The American Edition (''Luther's Works'') is the most extensive English translation of Luther's writings, indicated either by the abbreviation "LW" or "AE". The first 55 volumes were published 1955-1986, and a twenty volume extension (vols. 56-75) is planned of which volumes 58, 60, and 68 have appeared thus far.

See also

Christianity and antisemitism

Consubstantiation

List of Erasmus's correspondents

John Calvin

John Wycliffe

Lutheran Marian theology

Propaganda during the Reformation

Theologia Germanica

Theology of Martin Luther

Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany)

Translation

References

Further reading

For works by and about Luther, see Martin Luther (resources) or Luther's works at Wikisource.

Luther, M. ''The Bondage of the Will.'' Eds. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnson. Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1957. OCLC 22724565.

''Luther's Works'', 55 vols. Eds. H. T. Lehman and J. Pelikan. St Louis Missouri, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1955–86. Also on CD-ROM. Minneapolis and St Louis: Fortress Press and Concordia Publishing House, 2002.

Reu, Johann Michael ''Thirty-five Years of Luther Research'' Chicago: Wartburg Publishing House, 1917.

External links

''Booknotes'' interview with Martin Marty on ''Martin Luther'', April 11, 2004.

Category:1483 births Category:1546 deaths Category:16th-century German people Category:16th-century Latin-language writers Category:Anglican saints Category:Augustinian friars Category:Burials at All Saints' Church, Wittenberg Category:Christian Hebraists Category:Christian mystics Category:Christian religious leaders Category:German Christian ministers Category:German Lutheran theologians Category:German Lutherans Category:German Lutheran clergy Category:Lutheran priests Lutheran Category:German theologians Category:German translators Category:Lutheran theologians Category:Late Middle Ages Category:Latin–German translators Category:Lutheran hymnwriters Category:Lutheran sermon writers Category:Lutheran writers Category:People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar Category:People excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church Category:Converts to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism Category:People from Eisleben Category:Protestant Reformers Category:Renewers of the church Category:Anti-Catholicism Category:Translation scholars Category:Translators of the Bible into German Category:University of Erfurt alumni Category:University of Wittenberg faculty Category:Walhalla enshrinees Category:Apocalypticists

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name	Eddie Vedder
background	solo_singer
birth name	Edward Louis Severson III
alias	Ed VedderEdward MuellerJerome TurnerWes C. AddleJerome230E-Dogg
born	December 23, 1964Evanston, Illinois, U.S.
genre	Alternative rock, folk rock, grunge, hard rock
occupation	Musician, songwriter
years active	1986–present
instrument	Vocals, guitar, harmonica, ukulele, accordion, drums, bass, mandolin
label	MonkeywrenchA&M; RecordsEpic RecordsJ Records
associated acts	Pearl Jam, Bad Radio, Temple of the Dog, Hovercraft
notable instruments	Fender TelecasterSchecter PT ModelGibson SGGibson SG Jr.Martin 0-18Earnest Instruments Tululele, Custom Ukulele }}

Eddie Vedder (born Edward Louis Severson III; December 23, 1964) is an American musician and singer-songwriter who currently serves as the lead vocalist and one of four guitarists for the American alternative rock band Pearl Jam. Vedder left the Southern California music scene and moved to Seattle, Washington in 1990 to join Pearl Jam where he rose to fame amid the grunge movement of the early 1990s. He is notable for his baritone vocal style, and widely considered a cultural icon of alternative rock.

He is also involved in soundtrack work and contributes to albums by other artists. In 2007, Vedder released his first solo album as a soundtrack for the film ''Into the Wild'' (2007). His second album, ''Ukulele Songs'', along with a live DVD titled ''Water on the Road'', was released on 31 May 2011.

Early life

Vedder was born Edward Louis Severson III in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, son of Karen Lee Vedder and Edward Louis Severson, Jr. His father was a lounge musician. His parents divorced in 1965, when Vedder was one year old. His mother soon remarried a man named Peter Mueller, an attorney, and Vedder was raised believing that Mueller was his biological father. His adopted name became Edward Mueller. While living in Evanston, Vedder's family fostered seven younger children in a group home.

In the mid-1970s, the family, including Vedder's three younger half-brothers, moved to San Diego County, California. It was at this point that Vedder, who had received a guitar from his mother on his twelfth birthday, began turning to music (as well as basketball) as a source of comfort. He particularly found solace in The Who's 1973 album, ''Quadrophenia''. He said, "When I was around 15 or 16... I felt all alone... I was all alone—except for music." His mother and Mueller divorced when Vedder was in his late teens. His mother and brothers moved back to the Chicago area, but Vedder remained with his stepfather in California so he would not have to change high schools.

It was not until after the divorce that Vedder learned the truth about his parentage, that Mueller was really his stepfather. Vedder had met his biological father briefly as a child, but had believed that Severson was merely an old friend of his parents. By the time Vedder learned the truth, Severson had died of multiple sclerosis. By his senior year at San Dieguito High School, Vedder was on his own, living in an apartment and supporting himself with a nightly job at a drug store in Encinitas. He eventually dropped out of high school in his senior year due to the pressures of balancing school with working. He joined the rest of his family in Chicago, and it was at this time that he changed his name to Eddie Vedder, Vedder being his mother's maiden name.

In the early 1980s, Vedder worked as a waiter, earned his high school GED, and briefly attended a community college near Chicago. In 1984, Vedder returned to San Diego, California, with his girlfriend, Beth Liebling. He kept busy recording demo tapes at his home and working various jobs, including a position as a contracted security guard at the La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla. Vedder had several stints in San Diego area bands, including Surf and Destroy and The Butts. included future Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk. In 1988, Vedder became the vocalist for the San Diego progressive funk rock band Bad Radio. The music of the original incarnation of the band was influenced by Duran Duran; however, after Vedder joined Bad Radio, the band moved on to a more alternative rock sound influenced by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Temple of the Dog

After leaving Bad Radio, Vedder was without a band, and throughout the rest of 1990 he worked part-time as a night attendant at a local gas station. Through the Southern California music scene, Vedder met former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons, who became a friend of Vedder and who would play basketball with him. Later in 1990, Irons gave him a demo tape from a band in Seattle, Washington that was looking for a singer. He listened to the tape shortly before going surfing, where lyrics came to him. Vedder wrote lyrics for three of the songs in what he later described as a "mini-opera" entitled ''Mamasan''. The songs tell the story of a young man who, like Vedder, learns that he had been lied to about his paternity and that his real father is dead, grows up to become a serial killer, and is eventually imprisoned and sentenced to death. Vedder recorded vocals for the three songs, and mailed the demo tape back to Seattle. The three songs would later become Pearl Jam's "Alive", "Once", and "Footsteps", respectively.

After hearing Vedder's tape, former Mother Love Bone members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament invited Vedder to come to Seattle to audition for their new band. They were instantly impressed with his unique sound. At the time, Gossard and Ament were working on the Temple of the Dog project founded by Soundgarden's Chris Cornell as a musical tribute to Mother Love Bone's frontman Andrew Wood, who died of a heroin overdose at age 24. Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron and newcomer Mike McCready were also a part of the project. The song "Hunger Strike" became a duet between Cornell and Vedder. Cornell was having trouble with the vocals at practice, when Vedder stepped in. Cornell later said of Vedder that "he sang half of that song not even knowing that I'd wanted the part to be there and he sang it exactly the way I was thinking about doing it, just instinctively." Vedder would provide background vocals on several other songs as well. In April 1991, ''Temple of the Dog'' was released through A&M; Records.

Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam was formed in 1990 by Ament, Gossard, and McCready, who then recruited Vedder and drummer Dave Krusen. The band originally took the name Mookie Blaylock, but was forced to change it when the band signed to Epic Records in 1991. After the recording sessions for ''Ten'' were completed, Krusen left Pearl Jam in May 1991. As his replacement, Chamberlain suggested Dave Abbruzzese, who joined the group and played the rest of Pearl Jam's live shows supporting the ''Ten'' album.

''Ten'' broke the band into the mainstream, and became one of the best selling alternative albums of the 1990s. The band found itself amidst the sudden popularity and attention given to the Seattle music scene and the genre known as grunge. The single "Jeremy" received Grammy Award nominations for Best Rock Song and Best Hard Rock Performance in 1993. Pearl Jam received four awards at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards for its music video for "Jeremy", including Video of the Year and Best Group Video. ''Ten'' ranks number 207 on ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and "Jeremy" was ranked number 11 on VH1's list of the 100 greatest songs of the '90s.

left|thumb|Eddie Vedder appeared on the cover of the October 25, 1993 issue of ''[[Time (magazine)|Time'', as part of the feature article discussing the rising popularity of the grunge movement. Vedder had declined to participate, and was upset with the magazine about the cover.]]Following an intense touring schedule, the band went into the studio to record what would become its second studio album, ''Vs.'', released in 1993. Upon its release, ''Vs.'' set the record at the time for most copies of an album sold in a week, and spent five weeks at number one on the ''Billboard'' 200. ''Vs.'' was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album in 1995. From ''Vs.'', the song "Daughter" received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and the song "Go" received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Feeling the pressures of success, with much of the burden of Pearl Jam's popularity falling on Vedder, the band decided to decrease the level of promotion for its albums, including refusing to release music videos. Vedder's issue with fame came from what he stated as "what happens when a lot of these people start thinking you can change their lives or save their lives or whatever and create these impossible fuckin' expectations that in the end just start tearing you apart." In 1994, the band began a much-publicized boycott of Ticketmaster, which lasted for three years and limited the band's ability to tour in the United States. During the mid-1990s, Vedder faced what he called a "pretty intense stalker problem." Vedder would refer to the issue in the song "Lukin" from ''No Code''.

Later that same year the band released its third studio album, ''Vitalogy'', which became the band's third straight album to reach multi-platinum status. It was at this time that Vedder began to be featured more on rhythm guitar. Many of the songs on ''Vitalogy'' appear to be based by Vedder around the pressures of fame. The album received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Rock Album in 1996. ''Vitalogy'' was ranked number 492 on ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The lead single "Spin the Black Circle" won a Grammy Award in 1996 for Best Hard Rock Performance. Although Abbruzzese performed on the album ''Vitalogy'', he was fired in August 1994, four months before the album was released. The band cited political differences between Abbruzzese and the other members; for example, he disagreed with the Ticketmaster boycott. He was replaced by Jack Irons, a close friend of Vedder and the former and original drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band subsequently released ''No Code'' in 1996 and ''Yield'' in 1998. In 1998, prior to Pearl Jam's U.S. Yield Tour, Irons left the band due to dissatisfaction with touring. Pearl Jam enlisted former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron as Irons' replacement on an initially temporary basis, but he soon became a permanent replacement for Irons. "Do the Evolution" (from ''Yield'') received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance. In 1998, Pearl Jam recorded "Last Kiss", a cover of a 1960s ballad made famous by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. It was released on the band's 1998 fan club Christmas single; however, by popular demand, the cover was released to the public as a single in 1999. "Last Kiss" peaked at number two on the ''Billboard'' charts and became the band's highest-charting single.

In 2000, the band released its sixth studio album, ''Binaural'', and initiated a successful and ongoing series of official bootlegs. The band released seventy-two such live albums in 2000 and 2001, and set a record for most albums to debut in the ''Billboard'' 200 at the same time. "Grievance" (from ''Binaural'') received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance. The band released its seventh studio album, ''Riot Act'', in 2002. Pearl Jam's contribution to the 2003 film, ''Big Fish'', "Man of the Hour", was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 2004. The band's eighth studio album, the eponymous ''Pearl Jam'', was released in 2006. The band released its ninth studio album, ''Backspacer'', in 2009.

On Pearl Jam records, Vedder uses the pseudonym "Jerome Turner" for his non-musical (usually design and artwork) contributions. He has also at times used the pseudonym of "Wes C. Addle" ("West Seattle").

Other musical projects

Soundtrack contributions

Vedder has contributed solo material to several soundtracks and compilations, including the soundtracks for the films ''Dead Man Walking'' (1995), ''I Am Sam'' (2001), ''A Brokedown Melody'' (2004), ''Body of War'' (2007), and ''Reign Over Me'' (2007). Vedder collaborated with Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for his contributions to the ''Dead Man Walking'' soundtrack. He covered The Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" for the ''I Am Sam'' soundtrack. Vedder wrote two songs for the 2007 feature documentary, ''Body of War'', produced by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue: "No More" (a song referring to the Iraq War) and "Long Nights". Vedder and the supergroup The Million Dollar Bashers, which includes members from Sonic Youth, Wilco, and Bob Dylan's band, covered Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" for the biopic film, ''I'm Not There'' (2007). Pearl Jam recorded a cover version of The Who's song "Love, Reign o'er Me" for the film ''Reign Over Me'', which takes its title from the song. In 2010, Vedder recorded a new song, "Better Days", which appeared on the soundtrack to the 2010 film ''Eat Pray Love''.

''Into the Wild''

Vedder contributed an album's worth of songs to the soundtrack for the 2007 film, ''Into the Wild''. The soundtrack was released on September 18, 2007 through J Records. It includes covers of the Indio song "Hard Sun" and the Jerry Hannan song "Society". Vedder said that having to write songs based on a narrative "simplified things." He said, "There were fewer choices. The story was there and the scenes were there." Vedder's songs written for the film feature a folk sound. Thom Jurek of Allmusic called the soundtrack a "collection of folksy, rootsy tunes where rock & roll makes fleeting appearances." Vedder won a 2008 Golden Globe Award for the song "Guaranteed" from ''Into the Wild''. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his contributions to the film's original score. At the 2008 Grammy Awards, "Guaranteed" received a nomination for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. "Guaranteed" was also nominated a 2008 World Soundtrack Award in the category of Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film. At the 2009 Grammy Awards, "Rise" received a nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo.

Vedder promoted the ''Into the Wild'' soundtrack with his first solo tour, which began in April 2008. The April leg of the tour, dubbed the "April Fools Tour", began in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at The Centre on April 2, 2008 and was composed of ten dates focusing on the West Coast of the United States. Vedder continued the tour with a second leg in August 2008 composed of fourteen dates focusing on the East Coast and Canada. The second leg of the tour began in Boston, Massachusetts at the Boston Opera House and ended in Chicago, Illinois at the Auditorium Theatre. In June 2009, Vedder followed his 2008 solo tour with another solo tour composed of fourteen dates focusing on the Eastern United States and Hawaii, which began in Albany, New York at the Palace Theatre and continued through to Honolulu at the Hawaii Theatre.

''Ukulele Songs''

Vedder released his second solo album titled ''Ukulele Songs'', a collection of original songs and covers performed on the ukulele, on May 31, 2011. The first single from the album, "Longing to Belong," was released through digital retailers on March 21. A live DVD titled ''Water on the Road'', featuring live performances from two shows in Washington, D.C. during Vedder's 2008 solo tour, was released the same day as ''Ukulele Songs''.

Collaborations

In addition to playing with Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog, Vedder did perform or record with numerous well-known artists. He has appeared on albums by The Who, Ramones, Neil Young, R.E.M., Neil Finn, Bad Religion, Mark Seymour, Cat Power, Mike Watt, Fastbacks, Wellwater Conspiracy, Jack Irons, and John Doe, and has also recorded with The Strokes, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Supersuckers, Susan Sarandon, and Zeke. In the months of June and July 2006, Vedder made live performances jamming with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, singing on many tracks, including lead vocals on "The Waiting" and backing vocals on "American Girl". Vedder performed the songs "Break on Through (To the Other Side)", "Light My Fire" and "Roadhouse Blues" with the remaining members of The Doors at the 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He also performed with R.E.M. at the 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He also performed with The Stooges at the 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Vedder made a guest appearance at the Ramones' last show on August 6, 1996 at the Palace in Hollywood. Vedder has also performed live on stage with some of the biggest names in music and film including Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, Rolling Stones, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, Flea, Bryan Adams, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Roger Daltrey, Kings of Leon, Dave Grohl, Perry Farrell, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Jerry Cantrell, Andrew Stockdale, Josh Homme, Mike Ness, Neil Young, Guided By Voices, Ace Frehley, Dave Matthews, Natalie Maines, Tim Robbins, Johnny Depp, and many others.

Other work

Vedder had a brief acting cameo in the 1992 movie, ''Singles'', along with Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. He appeared as himself, playing drums in lead actor Matt Dillon's backing band, Citizen Dick. He was also interviewed for the 1996 grunge documentary, ''Hype!''. He appears in the 2003 Ramones documentary, ''End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones''. In 2007, he made a cameo as himself in the comedy film, ''Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story''. He appears in the 2007 Tom Petty documentary, ''Runnin' Down a Dream'', the 2008 political documentary, ''Slacker Uprising'', and the 2009 Howard Zinn documentary, ''The People Speak''.

Vedder is known for his outspoken left-wing/liberal social and political views. Discussing his views on current issues in the United States, Vedder said, "People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!"

In 1992, ''Spin'' printed an article by Vedder, entitled "Reclamation", which detailed his views on abortion. Vedder was outspoken in support of Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, and Pearl Jam played a series of concerts on the 2004 Vote for Change tour, supporting the candidacy of John Kerry for U.S. President. Vedder told ''Rolling Stone'' magazine, "I supported Ralph Nader in 2000, but it's a time of crisis. We have to get a new administration in." Vedder supported the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008.

In his spare time, Vedder is a surfer and active in surf-related conservation efforts, most notably The Surfrider Foundation. Vedder shows his support for environmental activism by sporting an Earth First! tattoo on his right calf. The logo is of a monkey wrench crossed with a stone hammer. Vedder is vegetarian.

Vedder is a longtime and outspoken supporter for the Free the West Memphis 3 movement, a cause that advocates the release of three teenagers (now in their 30's) who were convicted in 1994 of the gruesome murders of three little boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. In an interview with Larry King on December 19, 2007, Damien Echols, who is on death row for the murders, said that Vedder has been the "greatest friend a person could have" and that the two of them have collaborated on songs while he is in prison. The song "Army Reserve" on Pearl Jam's 2006 self-titled album features a lyrical collaboration between Vedder and Echols.

In 2009, Vedder performed in The People Speak a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States”.

Musical style and influences

Critic Jim DeRogatis describes Vedder's vocals as a "Jim Morrison-like vocal growl." Greg Prato of ''Allmusic'' said, "With his hard-hitting and often confessional lyrical style and Jim Morrison-esque baritone, Vedder also became one of the most copied lead singers in all of rock." Vedder has inducted The Doors, Neil Young, the Ramones, and R.E.M. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in his induction speeches he has cited them all as influences. Other influences that Vedder has cited include Bruce Springsteen, U2, The Who, The Jackson 5, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Tom Waits, Huey Lewis, Bob Dylan and the Pixies.

Vedder's lyrical topics range from personal ("Alive", "Better Man" (from ''Vitalogy'')) to social and political concerns ("Even Flow" (from ''Ten'')), "World Wide Suicide" (from ''Pearl Jam''). His lyrics have often invoked the use of storytelling and have included themes of freedom, individualism, and sympathy for troubled individuals. Other recurring themes include the use of water metaphors, as well as the idea of leaving everything behind to start again (featured in such songs as "Rearviewmirror" (from ''Vs.''), "MFC" (from ''Yield''), "Evacuation" (from ''Binaural''), and "Gone" (from ''Pearl Jam'')).

Although best known as a vocalist, Vedder also plays guitar on many Pearl Jam songs, beginning with the ''Vs.'' songs "Rearviewmirror" and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town". When the band started, Gossard and McCready were clearly designated as rhythm and lead guitarists, respectively. The dynamic began to change when Vedder started to play more rhythm guitar during the ''Vitalogy'' era. McCready said in 2006, "Even though there are three guitars, I think there's maybe more room now. Stone will pull back and play a two-note line and Ed will do a power chord thing, and I fit into all that." Vedder's guitar playing helped the band's sound progress toward a more stripped-down style; the songs "Rearviewmirror" and "Corduroy" (from ''Vitalogy'') feature Vedder's raw, punk-influenced guitar playing. As he had more influence on the band's sound, Vedder sought to make the band's musical output less catchy. He said, "I felt that with more popularity, we were going to be crushed, our heads were going to pop like grapes." He has also contributed performances on the ukulele, harmonica, accordion, and electric sitar to various Pearl Jam recordings.

'Weird Al' Yankovic wrote the song "My Baby's in Love with Eddie Vedder" for his album ''Running with Scissors''.

Live performances

Throughout Pearl Jam's career, Vedder has engaged in interactivity with the crowd during the band's concerts. Early in Pearl Jam's existence, Vedder and the band became known for their intense live performances. Vedder participated in stage diving as well as crowd surfing. During the early part of Pearl Jam's career, Vedder was known to climb the stage lighting rig and hang from the stage roof. Looking back at this time, Vedder said, "It's hard for us to watch early performances, even though that's when people think we were on fire and young. Playing music for as long as I had been playing music and then getting a shot at making a record and at having an audience and stuff, it's just like an untamed force...a different kind of energy. And I find it kind of hard to watch those early performances because it's so just fucking, semi-testosterone-fueled or whatever. But it didn't come from jock mentality. It came from just being let out of the gates."

Vedder's perspective on performing changed during the ''Vs.'' era, explaining that "a year later the meaning of a concert to me became, like, 'Wow, what if there was silence between the songs?' Then if I did say anything, then maybe the crowd could ''hear'' it." He also commented in regard to getting a crowd reaction that "you should be able to do it just with chord changes and the way you deliver a song." Even though he has ceased participating in more extreme concert activities, Vedder's connection with the audience has continued to play an important part in the band's concerts. He stated, "I look around the audience, and there's so many faces, and I've looked into the eyes of at least the ones I could see—there's at least 1,000 faces—and I've communicated directly to them and seen where they're coming from...One thing I don't feel is separation from the crowd. I don't feel like we're speaking from a platform, I feel like we are communicating on the same level."

Vedder began incorporating social commentary and political criticism into his lyrics and performances early in his career with Pearl Jam. He usually comments on politics between songs, often to criticize U.S. foreign policy. During Pearl Jam's 1992 appearance on ''MTV Unplugged'', Vedder stood atop his stool, took out a marker pen, and wrote "PRO-CHOICE" down his arm in large letters when the band performed the song "Porch". During Pearl Jam's 2007 Lollapalooza headlining show, Vedder and the band played a song telling the crowd in Chicago to boycott the oil company B.P. Amoco because they had been polluting Lake Michigan.

Personal life

Vedder's first marriage was to longtime girlfriend Beth Liebling. The couple were married in Rome on June 3, 1994. Vedder briefly served as the drummer for Liebling's instrumental experimental rock band Hovercraft in the mid-1990s, going by the stage name Jerome230. Describing his relationship with Liebling, Vedder said, "Relationships can be tough. There are times—I end up putting a lot of time into this music thing. I don't sleep at night. I think I'm probably a very difficult person to deal with. Things never seem to settle down and be normal, and I think that Beth has to deal with a lot. I don't want to get into our personal relations. But at times there is a tension... We are all selfish at heart, I guess. But I just know that without her, I'd be a kite without a string, a nothing man." Vedder and Liebling divorced in September 2000 after a 6-year marriage.

Vedder married model Jill McCormick on September 18, 2010. They have two daughters, Olivia, born June 11, 2004, and Harper Moon, born September 23, 2008. Vedder and McCormick became engaged in December 2009 at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington, D.C. .

Vedder attended San Dieguito High School, now called San Dieguito Academy. Vedder donated proceeds from a 2006 Pearl Jam concert in San Diego toward the construction of a theater for the school in the name of his former drama teacher, Clayton E. Liggett. Liggett was Vedder's mentor in high school. Vedder wrote the song "Long Road" (from ''Merkin Ball'') upon hearing of Liggett's death in 1995.

In a 1998 interview with Janeane Garofalo, Vedder stated a disbelief in God or Christianity, calling them "not good."

Vedder is a friend of The Who guitarist Pete Townshend and former Audioslave and current Soundgarden frontman, Chris Cornell. Townshend discouraged Vedder from retiring in 1993. In late 2007, Vedder wrote the foreword to a new Pete Townshend biography, ''Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend''. The book was published in the UK in March 2008 and in the U.S. in October 2008. Vedder was a close friend of the late Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone, with Vedder being at his side when he died. Since Ramone's death, Vedder and Pearl Jam have played the Ramones' "I Believe in Miracles" regularly at live shows. While driving home from Ramone's funeral, Vedder wrote the lyrics for the Pearl Jam song "Life Wasted" (from ''Pearl Jam''). He is also a friend of famed surfers Kelly Slater, Laird Hamilton, and fellow musicians Jack Johnson and Ben Harper. He was featured with Laird Hamilton in an episode of the documentary series ''Iconoclasts'' in 2006. While surfing with Tim Finn in New Zealand on March 25, 1995, Vedder was carried off the coast and had to be rescued by lifeguards. He also has paddled outrigger canoes on occasion and in 2005 was nearly lost at sea trying to paddle from Moloka'i to Oahu.

Vedder is a Chicago Bulls and Chicago Bears fan and a long-time, die-hard fan of the Chicago Cubs. He is friends with several Chicago sports figures, including former White Sox pitcher Jack McDowell, former Bulls player Dennis Rodman, former Blackhawks player Chris Chelios and Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood. Vedder occasionally wears a Walter Payton jersey while performing onstage. Vedder was wearing a White Sox hat given to him by McDowell during Pearl Jam's 1992 ''Saturday Night Live'' and ''MTV Unplugged'' appearances. In November 1993, Vedder and McDowell were involved in a bar room brawl in New Orleans, Louisiana that resulted in Vedder being arrested for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. The Pearl Jam song "Black, Red, Yellow" (from the "Hail, Hail" single) is about the Rodman/Michael Jordan/Phil Jackson-era Chicago Bulls teams. The middle of the song features a voice-mail message Rodman left for Vedder asking Vedder to return his call. Vedder sang the national anthem before the third game of the 1998 NBA Finals in Chicago, and has sung "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at five Cubs games since 1998. In 2007, a few days before performing with Pearl Jam in Chicago for Lollapalooza, he threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field, the home of the Cubs. Vedder wrote a song at the request of former Cubs shortstop and first baseman Ernie Banks paying tribute to the Cubs called "All the Way". On September 18, 2008, the song was made available for digital download via Pearl Jam's official website for US$0.99.

Discography

Solo discography

Year

Album details

Peak chart positions

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*Released: September 18, 2007

J Records>J

*Format: Compact Disc

''[[Ukulele Songs''

*Released: May 31, 2011

*Label: Monkey Wrench

*Format: CD, LP

Temple of the Dog discography

! Year	! Title	! Label	! Track(s)
1991

Pearl Jam discography

''Ten'' (1991)

''Vs.'' (1993)

''Vitalogy'' (1994)

''No Code'' (1996)

''Yield'' (1998)

''Binaural'' (2000)

''Riot Act'' (2002)

''Pearl Jam'' (2006)

''Backspacer'' (2009)

Singles

Year

Single

Peak chart positions

Album

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"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"

"Hard Sun"

''Into the Wild'' soundtrack

"Better Days"

"Longing to Belong"

"Can't Keep"

"Without You"

Contributions and collaborations

! Year	! Group	! Title	! Label	! Track(s)
	Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready with G. E. Smith	''The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration''		"Masters of War" (live)
Bad Religion	''Recipe for Hate''	Epitaph Records	"[[American Jesus" and Watch It Die
	Mike Watt	''Ball-Hog or Tugboat?''		"Big Train" and "Against the 70's"
Neil Young			"Peace and Love"
	Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan		Sony	"Face of Love" and "Long Road"
Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan		Sony	"Face of Love" and "Long Road"
Fastbacks	''New Mansions in Sound ''	Sub Pop	"Girl's Eyes"
Gary Heffern	''Painful Days''	Y-records	"Passin' Thru'"
Crowded House			"Everything Is Good for You"
		''Kerouac - kicks joy darkness''	Rykodisc	"Hymn"
Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready	''Tibetan Freedom Concert''	Capitol	"Yellow Ledbetter" (live)
Ramones	''We're Outta Here!''		"Any Way You Want It"
	Pete Townshend		Intersound
Eddie Vedder and Susan Sarandon			"Croon Spoon"
2000	Supersuckers with Eddie Vedder	''Free the West Memphis 3''		"Poor Girl"
	Wellwater Conspiracy	''The Scroll and Its Combinations''		"Felicity's Surprise"
Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready with Neil Young	''America: A Tribute to Heroes''		"Long Road" (live)
	Eddie Vedder		V2 Ada	"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"
Neil Finn	''7 Worlds Collide''	Nettwerk
		''We're a Happy Family - A Tribute to Ramones''	Columbia	"I Believe in Miracles" and "Daytime Dilemma (Dangers of Love)"
Cat Power	''You Are Free''		"Good Woman" and "Evolution"
The Who	''The Who Live at the Royal Albert Hall''	Steamhammer US
	Pete Townshend	''Magic Bus - Live from Chicago''	Compendia	"Magic Bus" (live) and "Heart to Hang Onto" (live)
Jack Irons	''Attention Dimension''	Breaching Whale	"Shine On You Crazy Diamond"
Red Whyte with Eddie Vedder	''The 5th Symphony Document: Soundtrack''	Folklore	"Lucky Country"
Eddie Vedder and the Walmer High School Choir	''The Molo Sessions''	Ten Club	"Long Road", "Love Boat Captain" and "Better Man"
	Eddie Vedder		Sony	"Face of Love" (with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), "Long Road" (with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), and "Dead Man"
Eddie Vedder	''A Brokedown Melody: Music from and Inspired By the Film''		"Goodbye"
Eddie Vedder with The Strokes & Josh Homme			"Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)"
	Eddie Vedder & The Million Dollar Bashers		Columbia	"All Along the Watchtower"
Crowded House	''Seattle, WA 09/01/2007''	Kufala	"World Where You Live" and "Something So Strong"
	Eddie Vedder with Ben Harper	''Body of War: Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran''		"No More" (live)
	''The Golden State''	Independent	"The Golden State Remix" (with Corin Tucker)
Crowded House	''Surf Aid - The Music''	Loop	"World Where You Live"
2010	Eddie Vedder		Monkeywrench Records	"The Long Road" (with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) and "Better Days"
2011	R.E.M.	''Collapse Into Now''		"It Happened Today"

Awards and nominations

"Guaranteed (Eddie Vedder song) align="center" rowspan="2" align="center" align="center" "Rise" align="center" align="center" align="center" align="center"

Award !! width="30"	Year !! Nominated work !! Category !! Result
Broadcast Film Critics Association	Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards	align="center"	Guaranteed" from ''Into the Wild'' ||	Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Song>Best Song
SIMA Waterman's Honorees	2007 ||	Eddie Vedder	Environmentalist of the Year
rowspan="2"	Golden Globe Awards	2008 ||	"Guaranteed" from ''Into the Wild''	Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song>Best Original Song
''Into the Wild'' (with Michael Brook and Kaki King)	Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score>Best Original Score
rowspan="2"	Grammy Awards	2008 ||	"Guaranteed" from ''Into the Wild''	Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media>Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media
align="center"	2009	|	Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo>Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo
mtvU#Woodie Awards	mtvU Woodie Awards	2008 ||	Eddie Vedder	The Good Woodie
Satellite Awards	2007 ||	"Rise" from ''Into the Wild''	Satellite Award for Best Original Song>Best Original Song
Online Film Critics Society	Online Film Critics Society Awards	2008 ||	''Into the Wild'' (with Michael Brook and Kaki King)	Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Original Score>Best Original Score
World Soundtrack Academy	World Soundtrack Awards	2008 ||	"Guaranteed" from ''Into the Wild''	World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film>Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film

References

External links

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/12/entertainment/la-et-people-speak12-2009dec12

Category:1964 births Category:American atheists Category:American baritones Category:American male singers Category:American rock singers Category:American vegetarians Category:Grunge musicians Category:J Records artists Category:Living people Category:Musicians from Illinois Category:Pearl Jam members Category:People from Evanston, Illinois Category:Rhythm guitarists Category:Temple of the Dog members Category:Ukulele players

cs:Eddie Vedder da:Eddie Vedder de:Eddie Vedder es:Eddie Vedder fr:Eddie Vedder gl:Eddie Vedder ko:에디 베더 hr:Eddie Vedder id:Eddie Vedder it:Eddie Vedder he:אדי ודר lb:Eddie Vedder hu:Eddie Vedder nl:Eddie Vedder no:Eddie Vedder pl:Eddie Vedder pt:Eddie Vedder ro:Eddie Vedder ru:Веддер, Эдди simple:Eddie Vedder sk:Eddie Vedder sl:Eddie Vedder sr:Еди Ведер fi:Eddie Vedder sv:Eddie Vedder tr:Eddie Vedder

birth date	June 09, 1963
birth place	Owensboro, Kentucky, U.S.
birth name	John Christopher Depp II
spouse	Lori Anne Allison (1983–1986)
partner	Sherilyn Fenn (1985–1988)Winona Ryder (1989–1993)Kate Moss (1994–1998)Vanessa Paradis (1998–present)
children	Lily-Rose Melody Depp (born 1999)John Christopher "Jack" Depp III (born 2002)
years active	1984–present
occupation	Actor, screenwriter, director, producer, musician }}

John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series ''21 Jump Street'', becoming a teen idol. Turning to film, he played the title character of ''Edward Scissorhands'' (1990), and later found box office success in films such as ''Sleepy Hollow'' (1999), ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' (2005), ''Rango'' (2011), and the ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' film series (2003–present). He has collaborated with director and friend Tim Burton in seven films, their most recent collaboration being ''Alice in Wonderland'' (2010).

Depp has gained acclaim for his portrayals of people such as Edward D. Wood, Jr., in ''Ed Wood'', Joseph D. Pistone in ''Donnie Brasco'', Hunter S. Thompson in ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', George Jung in ''Blow'', and the bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann's ''Public Enemies''. Films featuring Depp have grossed over $3.1 billion at the United States box office and over $7.6 billion worldwide. He has been nominated for top awards many times, winning the Best Actor Awards from the Golden Globes for ''Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'' and from the Screen Actors Guild for ''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl''. He also has garnered a sex symbol status in American cinema, being twice named as the Sexiest man alive by People magazine in 2003 and 2009.

Early life

Childhood

Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of John Christopher Depp, Sr., a civil engineer, and his wife, the former Betty Sue Wells, a waitress. He has one brother, Daniel, who is a novelist, and two sisters, Christie (now his personal manager) and Debbie. The Depp family in the United States began with a French Huguenot immigrant, Pierre Deppe or Dieppe, who settled in Virginia around 1700, part of a refugee colony situated above the falls on the James River. The actor has also surmised that he is part Native American, saying in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American [in me] somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek." More recently a hereditary connection between Depp and Queen Elizabeth II was discovered possibly making him her twentieth cousin.

The family moved frequently during Depp's childhood, and he and his siblings lived in more than 20 different locations, settling in Miramar, Florida, in 1970. In 1978, Depp's parents divorced. His mother married, as her second husband, Robert Palmer (died 2000), whom Depp called "an inspiration to me". He engaged in self-harm as a child, due to the stress of dealing with family problems. He has seven or eight self-inflicted scars. In a 1993 interview, he explained his self-injury by saying, "My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist".

1980s

With the gift of a guitar from his mother when he was twelve, Depp began playing in various garage bands. His first band was in honor of his girlfriend, Meredith. A year after his parents' divorce, Depp dropped out of high school to become a rock musician. He attempted to go back to school two weeks later, but the principal told him to follow his dream of being a musician. He played with The Kids, a band that enjoyed modest local success. The Kids set out together for Los Angeles in pursuit of a record deal, changing their name to Six Gun Method, but the group split up before signing a record deal. Depp subsequently collaborated with the band Rock City Angels and co-wrote their song "Mary", which appeared on Rock City Angels' debut for Geffen Records titled ''Young Man's Blues''.

On December 24, 1983, Depp married Lori Anne Allison, a makeup artist and sister of his band's bass player and singer. During Depp's marriage, his wife worked as a makeup artist, while he worked a variety of odd jobs, including a telemarketer for pens. His wife introduced him to actor Nicolas Cage, who advised Depp to pursue an acting career. Depp and his wife divorced in 1985. Depp later dated and was engaged to actress Sherilyn Fenn (whom he met on the set of the 1985 short film ''Dummies''). Both Fenn and Depp auditioned for the 1986 film ''Thrashin''' and they were both cast, with Depp being chosen by the film's director to star as the lead, which would have been Depp's second major role. Depp was later turned down by the film's producer, who rejected the director's decision.

Career

Television

Depp starred in a lead role on the Fox television series, ''21 Jump Street'', which premiered in 1987. Depp accepted this role to work with actor Frederic Forrest, who inspired him. Depp's long time friend Sal Jenco joined the cast as a semi-co-star as the janitor named Blowfish. The series' success turned Depp into a popular teen idol during the late 1980s. He felt "forced into the role of product." Depp decided to appear only in films that he felt were right for him.

Film roles

Depp's first major role was in the 1984 classic horror film ''A Nightmare on Elm Street'', playing the boyfriend of the heroine, Nancy Thompson (played by Heather Langenkamp) and one of Freddy Krueger's victims. Depp was the first choice and was cast to star in the 1986 American skater drama film ''Thrashin''', chosen and cast by the director but ultimately rejected by the film's producer. In 1986, he appeared in a secondary role as a Vietnamese-speaking private in Oliver Stone's ''Platoon''. In 1990, he undertook the quirky title role of the Tim Burton film, ''Edward Scissorhands''. The film's success began his long association with Burton.

Depp, a fan and long-time friend of writer Hunter S. Thompson, played a version of Thompson (named Raoul Duke) in 1998's ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', based on the writer's pseudobiographical novel of the same name. Depp accompanied Thompson as his road manager on one of the author's last book tours. In 2006, Depp contributed a foreword to ''Gonzo: Photographs by Hunter S. Thompson'', a posthumous biography published by ammobooks.com. In 2008, he narrated the documentary film ''Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson''. Depp paid for most of Thompson's memorial event, complete with fireworks and the shooting of Thompson's ashes by a cannon, in Aspen, Colorado, where Thompson lived. He returned to Thompson's work with a film adaptation of the novel ''The Rum Diary'', released in 2011.

Critics have described Depp's roles as characters who are "iconic loners." Depp has noted this period of his career was full of "studio defined failures" and films that were "box office poison," but he thought the studios never understood the films and did not do a good job of marketing. Depp has chosen roles which he found interesting, rather than those he thought would succeed at the box office. The 2003 Walt Disney Pictures film ''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl'' was a major success, in which Depp's performance as the suave pirate Captain Jack Sparrow was highly praised. Studio bosses were more ambivalent at first, but the character became popular with the movie-going public. According to a survey taken by Fandango, Depp was a major draw for audiences. The film's director, Gore Verbinski, has said that Depp's character closely resembles the actor's personality, but Depp said he modeled the character after Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Depp was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for the role.

In 2004, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, for playing Scottish author J. M. Barrie in the film ''Finding Neverland''. Depp next starred as Willy Wonka in the 2005 film ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'', a major success at the box office and earning him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.

Depp returned to the role of Jack Sparrow for the sequel ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'', which opened on July 7, 2006 and grossed $135.5 million in the first three days of its U.S. release, breaking a box office record of the highest weekend tally. The next sequel to ''Pirates of the Caribbean'', ''At World's End'', was released May 24, 2007. Depp has said that Sparrow is "definitely a big part of me", and he wants to play the role in further sequels. Depp voiced Sparrow in the video game, ''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow''. Johnny Depp's swashbuckling sword talents as developed for the character of Jack Sparrow, were highlighted in the documentary film ''Reclaiming the Blade''. Within the film, Swordmaster Bob Anderson shared his experiences working with Depp on the choreography for ''The Curse of the Black Pearl''. Anderson described in the film Depp's ability as an actor to pick up the sword to be "about as good as you can get."

Depp and Gore Verbinski were executive producers of the album ''Rogues Gallery, Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys.'' Depp played the title role of Sweeney Todd in Tim Burton's film adaptation of the musical, for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Depp thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and praised Tim Burton for his "unwavering trust and support."

Depp played the former Heath Ledger character in the 2009 film, ''The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'' along with Jude Law and Colin Farrell. All three actors gave their salaries from the film to Ledger's daughter, Matilda. He portrayed the Mad Hatter in Burton's ''Alice in Wonderland'', and the titular character in ''Rango''.

Future roles

Depp will appear in a film version of writer Hunter S. Thompson's book, ''The Rum Diary'', portraying the main character, Paul Kemp. In 2007, Depp accepted Warner Bros.' proposal to make a film of the gothic soap opera ''Dark Shadows'', a series that aired on ABC from 1966 to 1971. He had been a fan as a child. Depp and Graham King will produce the movie with David Kennedy, who ran Dan Curtis Productions inc. until Curtis died in 2006. Depp will also produce ''Hugo'', based on the novel ''The Invention of Hugo Cabret'', film a documentary about Keith Richards, and have a cameo appearance in ''Jack & Jill''. Depp will make a cameo appearance in a film adaptation of ''21 Jump Street'', the show he starred in during the late 1980s. Depp will star in and produce an adaptation of the comic book ''Rex Mundi''. Depp will collaborate with ''Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides'' director Rob Marshall again to create a remake of ''The Thin Man''. Depp also showed interest in starring in the next ''Sin City'' films, with Robert Rodriguez wanting him to star as Wallace. Depp was going to star as Tonto in an upcoming ''Lone Ranger'' film, but the project has currently been shelved due to budgetary concerns as well as a lack-lustre response to a recently-released Western-genre film (''Cowboys & Aliens''). Depp plans to star as Carl Kolchak in the project ''Night Stalker'', and has bought rights to the comic book ''The Vault''.

Collaboration with Tim Burton

Depp has collaborated with director and close friend Tim Burton in seven films, beginning with ''Edward Scissorhands'' (1990), opposite Winona Ryder and Vincent Price. His next role with Burton was in the 1994 film, ''Ed Wood''. Depp later said that "within 10 minutes of hearing about the project, I was committed." At the time, the actor was depressed about films and filmmaking. This part gave him a "chance to stretch out and have some fun"; he said working with Landau "rejuvenated my love for acting".

Depp did not work with Burton again until 2005 in ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'', in which he played Willy Wonka. Depp modeled the character's hair on Anna Wintour. The film was a box office success and received positive critical reception. Gene Wilder, who played Willy Wonka in the 1971 film, initially criticized this version. ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' was released in July, followed by ''Corpse Bride'', for which Depp voiced the character Victor Van Dort, in September.

''Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'' (2007) followed, bringing Depp his second major award win, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy as well as his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Burton first gave him an original cast recording of the 1979 stage musical in 2000. Although not a fan of the musical genre, Depp grew to like the tale's treatment. He cited Peter Lorre in ''Mad Love'' (1935) as his main influence for the role, and practiced the songs his character would perform while filming ''Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End''. Although he had performed in musical groups, Depp was initially unsure that he would be able to sustain Stephen Sondheim's lyrics. Depp recorded demos and worked with Bruce Witkin to shape his vocals without a qualified voice coach. In the ''DVD Reviews'' section, ''Entertainment Weekly'''s Chris Nashawaty gave the film an A minus, stating, "Depp's soaring voice makes you wonder what other tricks he's been hiding... Watching Depp's barber wield his razors... it's hard not to be reminded of ''Edward Scissorhands'' frantically shaping hedges into animal topiaries 18 years ago... and all of the twisted beauty we would've missed out on had [Burton and Depp] never met." In his introduction to ''Burton on Burton'', a book of interviews with the director, Depp called Burton "...a brother, a friend,...and [a] brave soul". The next Depp-Burton collaboration was ''Alice in Wonderland'' (2010). Depp played the Mad Hatter alongside Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Alan Rickman.

Production company

In 2004, Depp formed his production company Infinitum Nihil to develop projects where he will serve as actor and/or producer. Depp is the founder and CEO, while his sister, Christi Dembrowski, serves as president. The company's first production came in 2011 with ''The Rum Diary'', adapted from the novel of the same name by Hunter S. Thompson. The film is written and directed by Bruce Robinson. Also in 2011, ''Hugo'', directed by Martin Scorsese, was released. In 2012, they will release ''Dark Shadows'', directed by Tim Burton.

Other interests

Music

As a guitar player, Depp has played slide guitar on the Oasis song "Fade In-Out" (from ''Be Here Now,'' 1997), as well as on "Fade Away (Warchild Version)" (b-side of the "Don't Go Away" single). He also played acoustic guitar in the movie ''Chocolat'' and on the soundtrack to ''Once Upon a Time in Mexico.'' He is a friend of The Pogues' Shane MacGowan, and performed on MacGowan's first solo album. He was also a member of P, a group featuring Butthole Surfers singer Gibby Haynes, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. He has appeared in Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' music video "Into the Great Wide Open". He made a cameo as the Mad Hatter in the music video for Avril Lavigne's "Alice" in 2010.

Winemaker and restaurateur

Depp and Paradis grow grapes and have wine making facilities in their vineyard in Plan-de-la-Tour north of Saint-Tropez. He is known for a fondness of French wines: among Depp's favorites are the Bordeaux wines Château Calon-Ségur, Château Cheval Blanc and Château Pétrus, and the Burgundy wine Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Interviewed in ''Madame Figaro'', he stated, "With those wines, you reach nirvana". Along with Sean Penn, John Malkovich and Mick Hucknall, Depp co-owned the Parisian restaurant-bar Man Ray, located near the Champs-Élysées.

Personal life

Family and relationships

Depp was engaged to actress Winona Ryder for three years beginning in July 1990. They met at the ''Great Balls of Fire!'' premiere in June 1989; two months later they began dating. The relationship was highly publicized and received much scrutiny by the media and tabloid press.

Since 1998, following a four year relationship with British supermodel Kate Moss, Depp has had a relationship with Vanessa Paradis, a French actress and singer whom he met while filming ''The Ninth Gate''.

The couple have two children. Daughter Lily-Rose Melody Depp was born May 27, 1999, and son John "Jack" Christopher Depp III was born April 9, 2002. To thank Great Ormond Street Hospital, Depp visited the hospital in November 2007 dressed in his Captain Jack Sparrow outfit and spent 4 hours reading stories to the children. In 2008 he donated £1 million (about $2 million) to the hospital.

Although Depp has not remarried, he has stated that having children has given him "real foundation, a real strong place to stand in life, in work, in everything." "You can't plan the kind of deep love that results in children. Fatherhood was not a conscious decision. It was part of the wonderful ride I was on. It was destiny; kismet. All the math finally worked." The family divides its time between their home in Meudon, located in the suburbs of Paris, Los Angeles, an island he bought in The Bahamas, and their villa in Le Plan-de-la-Tour, a small town 20 km from Saint-Tropez, in the south of France. Depp also acquired a vineyard estate in the Plan-de-la-Tour area in 2007.

Legal issues

In 1994, Depp was arrested and questioned by police for allegedly causing serious damage to a New York City hotel suite.

He was arrested again in 1999 for brawling with paparazzi outside a restaurant while dining in London with Paradis.

Tattoos

Depp has around 13 tattoos, many of them signifying important persons or events in his life. They include a Native American in profile and a ribbon reading "Wino Forever" (originally "Winona Forever", altered after his breakup with Winona Ryder) on his right biceps, "Lily-Rose" (his daughter's name) over his heart, "Betty Sue" (his mother's name) on his left biceps, and a sparrow flying over water with the word "Jack" (his son's name; the sparrow is flying towards him rather than away from him as it is in ''Pirates of the Caribbean'') on his right forearm.

Unannounced appearance on set

On October 8, 2010, Depp made an unannounced appearance at a London Primary School near where he was filming scenes for ''Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides''. He turned up dressed as his character Jack Sparrow after receiving a letter from a pupil asking for his help with a class mutiny.

Controversy

Comments on U.S.

In 2003, Depp's comments about the United States appeared in Germany's ''Stern'' magazine: "America is dumb, is something like a dumb puppy that has big teeth — that can bite and hurt you, aggressive." Although he later asserted that the magazine misquoted him and the quotation was taken out of context, Stern stood by its story, as did CNN.com in its coverage of the interview. CNN added his remark that he would like his children "to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out." The July 17, 2006 edition of ''Newsweek'' reprinted the "dumb puppy" quotation, verbatim, in the context of a Letter to the Magazine. Depp has also disagreed with subsequent media reports that he says paint him as a "European wannabe", saying that he likes the anonymity of living in France and his simpler life there.

Awards and nominations

Some of the awards that Depp has won include honors from the London Film Critics Circle (1996), Russian Guild of Film Critics (1998), Screen Actors Guild Awards (2004) and a Golden Globe for Best Actor. At the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, he won the award for "Best Villain" for his portrayal of Sweeney Todd and "Best Comedic Performance" for Jack Sparrow. Depp has been nominated for three Academy Awards, in 2004 for ''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl'', in 2005 for ''Finding Neverland'', and in 2008 for ''Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street''. Depp won his first Golden Globe for his portrayal of Sweeney Todd in 2008.

Filmography

+
! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes	! Budget	! Gross
1984	''''			$1.8 million	$25,504,513
1985	''Private Resort''	Jack Marshall		N/A	$331,816
1986		Specialist Gator Lerner		$6 million	$138,530,565
1990	''Cry-Baby''	Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker		$12 million	$8,266,343
1990	''Edward Scissorhands''	Edward Scissorhands	Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy	$20 million	$86,024,005
1991	''Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare''	Teen on TV	Cameo (as Oprah Noodlemantra)	$11 million	$34,872,033
1993	''What's Eating Gilbert Grape''	Gilbert Grape		$11 million	$10,032,765
1993	''Benny & Joon''	Sam	Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy	N/A	$23,261,580
1993	''Arizona Dream''	Axel Blackmar		N/A	$112,547
1994		Edward D. Wood, Jr.	London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor also for ''Don Juan DeMarco''Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy	$18 million	$5,887,457
1995		Gene Watson		N/A	$8,175,346
1995	''Dead Man''	William Blake		$9 million	$1,037,847
1995	''Don Juan DeMarco''	Don Juan/John R. DeMarco		$25 million	$68,792,531
1996		Himself		N/A	N/A
1997		Donnie Brasco/Joseph D. Pistone		$35 million	$124,909,762
1997	''''	Raphael	Nominated—Best Actor Award (Cannes Film Festival)	N/A	N/A
1998		Raoul Duke	playing Hunter S. Thompson	$18.5 million	$10,680,275
1998	''L.A. Without a Map''	Himself/William Blake	Cameo	N/A	N/A
1999		Ichabod Crane	Nominated—Satellite Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or ComedyNominated—Saturn Award for Best Actor	$70 million	$206,071,502
1999	''''	Spencer Armacost		$75 million	$19,598,588
1999	''''	Dean Corso		$38 million	$58,401,898
2000		Roux	Nominated—Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture	$25 million	$152,699,946
2000		Lt. Victor, Bon Bon		N/A	$8,527,517
2001		Frederick Abberline	Nominated—Saturn Award for Best Actor	$35 million	$74,558,115
2000	''''	Cesar	(Limited release)		$1,790,840
2001		George Jung		$53 million	$83,282,296
2003	''Once Upon a Time in Mexico''	Sheldon Sands	Nominated—Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture	$29 million	$98,185,582
2003	''Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl''		Empire Award for Best ActorIrish Film Award for Best International ActorScreen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading RoleNominated—Academy Award for Best ActorNominated—BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading RoleNominated—Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best ActorNominated—Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best ActorNominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or ComedyNominated—Online Film Critics Society Award for Best ActorNominated—Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best ActorNominated—Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or ComedyNominated—Saturn Award for Best ActorNominated—Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor	$140 million	$654,264,015
2004		L'inconnu	Cameo	N/A	$6,204,504
2004	''Finding Neverland''	J. M. Barrie		$25 million	$118,676,606
2004	''Secret Window''	Mort Rainey		$40 million	$92,913,171
2004	''''	John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester		$20 million	$10,852,064
2005		Willy Wonka	Sony Ericsson Empire Awards	$150 million	$474,968,763
2005	''[[Corpse Bride''			$40 million	$117,195,061
2006	''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest''	Captain Jack Sparrow	Sony Ericsson Empire Awards	$225 million	$1,066,179,725
2007	''[[Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End''	Captain Jack Sparrow	Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Male Movie StarMTV Movie Award for Best Comedic PerformanceRembrandt Award for Best International ActorNominated—National Movie Award for Best Performance by a MaleNominated—Teen Choice Award for Best Action Adventure Actor	$300 million	$963,420,425
2007		Sweeney Todd/Benjamin Barker		$50 million	$152,523,164
2009		John Dillinger	Nominated—Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama	$100 million	$214,104,620
2009	''''	Tony (1st transformation)	Shared role with Colin Farrell and Jude Law after the death of Heath Ledger	$30 million	$61,808,775
2010		Mad Hatter	Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or ComedyNominated—MTV Movie Award for Global SuperstarNominated—National Movie Award for Best PerformanceNominated—Teen Choice Award for Best Fantasy Actor	$200 million	$1,024,299,904
2010	''''	Frank Tupelo/Alexander Pearce		$100 million	$278,346,189
2011		Rango	Voice acting	$135 million	$242,605,737
2011	''[[Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides''	Captain Jack Sparrow		$250 million	$1,032,828,392
2011	''''	Paul Kemp	post-production	$65 million
2011			Cameopost-production
2012			Cameopost-production
2012		Barnabas Collins	filming

+ Producer
! Year	! Title	Notes
2011		post-production
2011		post-production
2012		filming

+ Director
! Year	! Title	Notes
1992		short film
1997	''The Brave''
2012	''Keith Richards Documentary''	filming

+ Writer
! Year	! Title
1997	''The Brave''

+ Documentary
! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes
1999		Jack Kerouac
2002	''Lost in La Mancha''	Himself	Uncredited role
2006	''Deep Sea 3D''	Narrator
2007		Himself
2008	''Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson''	Narrator
2010	''When You're Strange''	Narrator

+ Music
! Year	! Title	Songs
2000		"Minor Swing","They're Red Hot","Caravan"
2003	''Once Upon a Time in Mexico''	"Sands' Theme"
2007		"No Place Like London","My Friends","Pirelli's Miracle Elixir","Pretty Women","Epiphany","A Little Priest","Johanna (Act II)","By The Sea","The Judge's Return","Final Scene (Part 1)","Final Scene (Part 2)"

+ Television
Year	! Production	! Role	Notes
1985		Lionel Viland	Episode: "Beasts of Prey"
1986		Donnie Fleischer	TV film
1987–1991	''21 Jump Street''	Officer Thomas "Tom" Hanson, Jr.	TV series (57 episodes)
1987		Rob Cameron	Episode: "Unfinished Business"
1999	''The Vicar of Dibley''	Himself	Episode: "Celebrity Party"
2000	''The Fast Show''	Himself	Episode: "The Last Ever Fast Show"
2004	''King of the Hill''	Yogi Victor (voice)
2009	''SpongeBob SquarePants''	Jack Kahuna Laguna (voice)	Episode: "SpongeBob vs. The Big One"

References

Bibliography

External links

Category:1963 births Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:Actors from Florida Category:Actors from Kentucky Category:American expatriates in France Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American people of French descent Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:Best Musical or Comedy Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Living people Category:People from Owensboro, Kentucky Category:People of Huguenot descent

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