From National Book Award-winning author Martin Marty, the surprising story of a Christian classic born in a Nazi prison cell

For fascination, influence, inspiration, and controversy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison is unmatched by any other book of Christian reflection written in the twentieth century. A Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer spent two years in Nazi prisons before being executed at age thirty-nine for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. Ever since it was published in 1951, Letters and Papers from Prison has had a tremendous impact on Christian and secular thought, and has helped establish Bonhoeffer's reputation as one of the most important Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. In this, the first history of the book's remarkable global career, National Book Award-winning writer Martin Marty tells how and why Letters and Papers from Prison has been read and used in such dramatically different ways, from the cold war to today.