Andrew Carroll (born September 27, 1969) is an American author, editor, playwright, public speaker, nonprofit executive, and historian.
Carroll is known as the editor of the New York Times best sellers Letters of a Nation,Arnold, Martin. "Joys of Reading Others' Mail". The New York Times. December 16, 1999. Behind the Lines, and War Letters,Foderaro, Lisa W. "Poetry for the People". The New York Times. February 12, 1997.Scott, Janny. "Along With the Bible, a Poetry Anthology". The New York Times. March 15, 1994. which later inspired the documentary of the same name.Ryan, Suzanne C. "From the Trenches". The Boston Globe. November 9, 2001; Rosenberg, Howard. "Dispatches From the Trenches". Los Angeles Times. November 9, 2001; Mink, Eric. "War, In Their Own Words". New York Daily News. November 9, 2001. He is also known for seeking out and preserving war-related correspondences, distributing millions of free books to the general public throughout the United States and to U.S. troops abroad, and finding and bringing attention to unmarked but historically significant sites across America.
Early life Carroll was adopted as an infant in Washington, D.C., and raised by Marea and Thomas Edmund Carroll, who helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Carroll attended Sidwell Friends High School and graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 1993, receiving his bachelor's degree in English literature. His older brother and only sibling, Christopher Carroll, is a professional photographer and filmmaker who was once a photo editor for the music magazine Spin. Christopher Carroll is also the co-editor with his wife, Liz Mechem, of the book Legends of Country.
In 1991, during his sophomore year at Columbia, Andrew Carroll wrote his first book, Volunteer USA: A Comprehensive Guide to Worthy Causes That Need You. Carroll followed it up in 1994 with Golden Opportunities: A Volunteer Guide for Americans Over 50.
The American Poetry & Literacy (APL) Project In 1991, during his junior year at Columbia, Carroll was inspired by a lecture given at the Library of Congress by Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Poet Laureate of the United States. Brodsky recommended that free poetry books should be widely disseminated to the American public. Carroll wrote to Brodsky offering to help start the initiative, and, after meeting in 1992, they launched what Carroll named: the American Poetry & Literacy (APL) Project, a nonprofit organization that would distribute free poetry books to the general public.
Carroll persuaded the Book-of-the-Month Club to donate to the APL Project thousands of copies of the book, Six American Poets: An Anthology, edited by Joel Conarroe, which features poems by Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. DoubleTree was the first hotel chain to agree to place the books in its rooms.
The APL Project expanded into giving away free books in schools, supermarkets, homeless shelters, senior centers, jury waiting rooms, and similar public venues. Carroll began working with Dover Publications, buying up large quantities of their inexpensive "thrift editions" and distributing specific books at certain times of the year (e.g., Great Love Poems for Valentines Day, funded by Lancôme, and The Raven and Other Favorite Poems by Edgar Allan Poe for Halloween).
After Joseph Brodsky died from a heart attack at the age of 55, Carroll went on a nationwide tour in Brodsky's honor and drove across the country and gave away 100,000 free books. The trip, which Carroll called The Great APLseed Giveaway began in April (National Poetry Month) 1998 and lasted for five weeks. The trip was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Washington Apple Commission, and it was inspired by Johnny Appleseed's travels throughout the United States. DoubleTree Hotels provided Carroll with free lodging, and Ryder loaned Carroll a truck that he filled with books. Carroll drove from New York to California and handed out books at truck stops, hospitals, supermarkets, schools, bus and train stations, zoos, a White Castle hamburger restaurant in Chicago, and a casino and a 24-hour wedding chapel in Las Vegas. In 1998, Carroll convinced Amtrak to place thousands of copies of a poetry anthology, titled Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure (Dover). In April 1999, Volkswagen agreed to put 40,000 poetry books provided by the APL Project in the glove compartment of its cars as they came off the assembly line."Harper's Index", Harper's magazine, p. 17. January 1999 American Airlines placed 100,000 copies of Songs for the Open Road in the seat backs of their planes in April 2000. And the Target Corporation paid the APL Project for 300,000 books to give away to their customers. Before the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the International Olympic Committee contacted Carroll and requested that he edit a special anthology of international verse that would be given to athletes and spectators. Carroll created the book A World of Poetry (Dover) which was distributed throughout Salt Lake City during the Olympics.
The Legacy Project While still involved with the poetry initiative,"The Legacy Project". WarLetters.com. No date. Accessed 2009-07-15. Carroll founded the Legacy Project, a national, all-volunteer effort that worked to honor and remember America's veterans and troops by seeking out and preserving their war-related correspondences.Carroll, Andrew. War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars. Reprint ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. ; Rossi, Holly Lebowitz. "Letters Old and New Illuminate Faith in War's Trenches". Publishers Weekly. February 14, 2007.Salamon, Julie. "The Troops at the Front as Poets for Future Readers". The New York Times. November 9, 2001. Carroll was inspired to create the Legacy Project after his family's home in Washington, D.C., burned down during his sophomore year of college and destroyed most of his and his family's personal memorabilia and correspondence.Lacher, Irene. "Legacy of Pen, Sword". Los Angeles Times. February 17, 2002.
In 1997, Carroll edited his first New York Times best seller, Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters (with an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman), which features more than 200 letters written by famous and not-so-famous individuals from the past 350 years. Some of the letters, including one by a Navajo code talker, had never been published before.
In the summer of 1998, Carroll contacted Dear Abby, who frequently promoted causes that helped troops and veterans, and asked her to write a column requesting that people share with the Legacy Project any war-related letters they had written or had received from loved ones. Abby published the column on Veterans Day in 1998 and included a post office box that Carroll had set up for people to send in their war letters.McDonald, William. "In Wartime Letters Home, Eloquence of Common Men". The New York Times. November 11, 1999. Within a year, Carroll had received more than 15,000 letters, some of them dating as far back as the American Revolution. News about the Legacy Project caught the attention of former CBS News correspondent Harry Smith. Smith subsequently produced a documentary about war correspondence, Dear Home: Letters From World War II, which aired on the History Channel in 1999.
Director Steven Spielberg heard about Carroll's Legacy Project and asked him to find a World War II couple who would read some of their wartime love letters at a televised event, which was broadcast to millions, in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on December 31, 1999, as part of the nation's millennial celebrations.
War Letters-related books, documentaries, and memorials
In 2001, Carroll edited the book War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, based on the correspondence collected by the Legacy Project."'War Letters' Lets Soldiers Speak". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. November 11, 2001. Scribner's gave Carroll a $500,000 advance for the book (money Carroll donated to veterans' groups). The book became a New York Times best seller."Best Sellers: July 1, 2001". The New York Times. July 1, 2001. All of the letters in the book were previously unpublished, including letters by William T. Sherman, Clara Barton, Helen Keller, George H. W. Bush (who wrote from a submarine that had rescued him after he'd been shot down and almost killed), H. Richard Hornberger (a Korean War surgeon who later wrote the book MASH), Colin Powell, and Julia Child, who, before she became "the French chef", served as a spy during World War II in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA).
The audio version of War Letters, which features famous journalists and actors (including Tom Brokaw, Rob Lowe, Noah Wyle, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Julianna Margulies, Giovanni Ribisi, Campbell Scott, and Eric Stoltz), reading the letters, was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best Spoken Word" category in 2001. War Letters lost to Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, read by Quincy Jones.
In 2001, War Letters inspired a one-hour documentary of the same name for PBS' American Experience series. Edward Norton, Joan Allen, Esai Morales, Bill Paxton, and David Hyde Pierce were among the actors who read letters for the film, which was directed by Robby Kenner.
Letters from Carroll's archive have been displayed in local and national museums throughout the United States, as well as on veterans' memorials, including in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Temecula, California.
From September 2003 through March 2004, Carroll traveled to almost 40 countries around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, to meet with U.S. troops and to seek out more letters and emails. This journey inspired Carroll's third New York Times best seller, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters—and One Man's Search to Find Them, in 2005.Wyatt, Edward. "Arts, Briefly: Warrior Writers". The New York Times. December 16, 2005.Carroll, Andrew, ed. Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters—and One Man's Search to Find Them. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. .
Two years later, Carroll edited Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War, which focuses on the role of religion and spiritual beliefs in wartime.Carroll, Andrew, ed. Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Several of Carroll's books have been translated into other languages, including Behind the Lines, which was published in Brazil as Cartos do Front: Relatos emocionantes da vida na Guerra.
Since 2001, Carroll has also organized events that feature famous Americans reading war letters. Presenters have included senators, generals, actors, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, journalists, and the relatives of service members killed in action. At a May 2005 reading in New York to celebrate the publication of Behind the Lines, the author Kurt Vonnegut read a letter he had written in 1945 after surviving the firebombing of Dresden and which was published for the first time in Carroll's book.
Reviving the Armed Services Editions