38 Facts About Andrew Carroll

Andrew Carroll was born on September 27,1969 and is an American author, editor, playwright, public speaker, nonprofit executive, and historian.

Andrew Carroll is known for seeking out and preserving war-related correspondences, distributing millions of free books to the general public throughout the United States and to US troops abroad, and finding and bringing attention to unmarked but historically significant sites across America.

Andrew Carroll was adopted as an infant in Washington, DC, and raised by Marea and Thomas Edmund Andrew Carroll, who helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Andrew Carroll's 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 Andrew Carroll is 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.

Andrew Carroll followed it up in 1994 with Golden Opportunities: A Volunteer Guide for Americans Over 50.

In 1991, during his junior year at Columbia, Andrew 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.

Andrew 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.

The trip, which Andrew Carroll called The Great APLseed Giveaway began in April 1998 and lasted for five weeks.

Andrew 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, Andrew Carroll convinced Amtrak to place thousands of copies of a poetry anthology, titled Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure.

Andrew Carroll created the book A World of Poetry which was distributed throughout Salt Lake City during the Olympics.

Andrew Carroll was inspired to create the Legacy Project after his family's home in Washington, DC, burned down during his sophomore year of college and destroyed most of his and his family's personal memorabilia and correspondence.

In 1997, Andrew Carroll edited his first New York Times best seller, Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters, which features more than 200 letters written by famous and not-so-famous individuals from the past 350 years.

Abby published the column on Veterans Day in 1998 and included a post office box that Andrew Carroll had set up for people to send in their war letters.

In 2001, Andrew Carroll edited the book War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, based on the correspondence collected by the Legacy Project.

Letters from Andrew 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, Andrew Carroll traveled to almost 40 countries around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, to meet with US troops and to seek out more letters and emails.

Two years later, Andrew Carroll edited Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War, which focuses on the role of religion and spiritual beliefs in wartime.

Several of Andrew 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, Andrew Carroll has organized events that feature famous Americans reading war letters.

In 2000, Andrew Carroll approached book publishers and encouraged them to revive the Armed Services Editions, which were paperback books formatted to fit into a cargo pocket and distributed specifically to American troops during World War II.

In 2000, Andrew Carroll began working with major publishers to bring back the ASEs.

The NEA received an estimated 10,000 pages of material, and the agency asked Andrew Carroll to edit the material into an anthology.

Andrew Carroll agreed and edited the book, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and Their Families, on a pro bono basis.

Andrew Carroll led regular writing workshops for troops and veterans on military bases and at VA hospitals, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

Andrew Carroll wrote, A Guide for Writers, a free, 43-page booklet published by the NEA that was created to help other workshop leaders and potential authors, including active duty troops, veterans, and their loved ones, write about the military experience.

In June 2009, Andrew Carroll launched the "Here Is Where" campaign, an all-volunteer effort to find and bring attention to unmarked historic locations throughout the United States.

Andrew Carroll traveled to all 50 states to find these overlooked sites, and he chronicled his journey in the book Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History.

Andrew Carroll has used funds from his Here Is Where book to pay for and put up plaques and signs at some of the unmarked places he found.

In November 2004, Andrew Carroll wrote an article for National Geographic magazine about his trip to almost 40 countries around the world.

The article was read by a theatre professor named John Benitz at Chapman University, who contacted Andrew Carroll and suggested that Andrew Carroll's travels, along with excerpts from the letters he found, could be the basis of a play.

Andrew Carroll agreed and sent Benitz a script, which Benitz workshopped with his students.

Andrew Carroll picked the title, If All the Sky Were Paper, based on a sentence from a letter written by a 14-year-old Polish boy interned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

In 2013, Andrew Carroll donated his entire collection of approximately 100,000 war letters to Chapman University.

Also in April 2017, PBS aired a three-part documentary on World War I, titled The Great War, and Andrew Carroll was featured in the film talking about General Pershing and other aspects of the war.

Andrew Carroll has received, among other accolades: the Daughters of the American Revolution's Medal of Honor award; the Order of Saint Maurice, bestowed by the National Infantryman's Association; the Young Alumni Achievement Award, presented by Andrew Carroll's alma mater, Columbia University; the IONA Senior Service's President's Award; and the National Endowment for the Arts' Chairman's Medal, the highest award given by the NEA chairman.