Andrew Carroll
Photo by Chris Carroll

In 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project (www.warletters.com), a national, all-volunteer effort to honor and remember those who have served this nation in wartime by seeking out and saving their letters. From this project came Carroll's bestseller War Letters, the compelling correspondence of American military men and women, as well as the PBS documentary of the same name. The book features 200 previously unpublished letters from the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Bosnia. Studs Terkel said of the collection, “These war letters are deeply moving, more revelatory and more powerful than any dispatch from the front. It's the truly felt history of what war is all about.” This book came on the heels of Carroll's national bestseller Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters. In 1993, Carroll co-founded with the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a nonprofit organization that distributes hundreds of thousands of free poetry books throughout the country to promote literacy. Carroll lives in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Carroll edited Operation Homecoming on a pro bono basis.

Throughout our country, old war letters are regularly being destroyed, misplaced, lost to fire and water damage, or thrown away. These letters are the first, unfiltered drafts of history. They are eyewitness accounts that record not only the minute details of war but the personal insight and perspective no photograph or film reel can replicate. And each one represents another page in our national autobiography.

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