Luke Skywalker is a human male raised on Tatooine by Owen and Beru Lars, introduced in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977) and played by Mark Hamill. On screen his arc is compact: three films, farm boy to Jedi Knight, a refusal to kill his father that redeems both of them. In print he is something much stranger — the single most rewritten character in the franchise.
The Legends Luke
The Bantam and Del Rey Expanded Universe, running from 1991 to 2014, gave Luke roughly forty years of additional life. He rebuilds the Jedi Order on Yavin 4, marries Mara Jade, has a son named Ben, buries one nephew and watches another become a Sith Lord. That version of the character is now Star Wars Legends: still in print, no longer binding. It is also, for a large part of this site's readership, the definitive one, because it is the version they grew up with.
The canon Luke
Current canon replaces almost all of it. The post-2014 novels and comics keep him a searcher rather than a founder for far longer, and The Last Jedi (2017) hands him an ending the Bantam books would never have written: a Jedi Master who fails his student, exiles himself, and has to be argued back into the fight. Whether you find that a betrayal or the most interesting thing anyone has done with him is the oldest live argument in Star Wars fandom, and this site is not going to settle it for you.
What to read
For Legends, the Thrawn trilogy is where his post-Jedi life properly begins. For canon, the Marvel Star Wars ongoing and the various young-reader and adult novels set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back do the patient work of showing a man teaching himself a religion from fragments, with nobody left alive to correct him.
Why he matters here
Because Luke is the load-bearing wall. Almost every major decision the publishing programme has made — the 1991 relaunch, the 2014 reset, the sequel-era novels — is in some sense a decision about what happens to Luke Skywalker next.
