[6] 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.

[11] Carroll attended Sidwell Friends High School and graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 1993, receiving his bachelor's degree in English literature.

[citation needed] 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.

[13][17] The APL Project expanded into giving away free books in schools, supermarkets, homeless shelters, senior centers, jury waiting rooms, and similar public venues.

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.

[19][20] 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).

[17][23][24] While still involved with the poetry initiative,[25] 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.

[3] 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.

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.

[6][33] 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,[34] and Temecula, California.

More than 1,300 titles were published, including mysteries, biographies, crime stories, adventure novels, and classic works of literature by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Herman Melville.

Hyperion, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Oxford University Press, and Dover Publications were among the first to join to publish and give away free ASEs to troops overseas and serving on U.S. warships.

More than two million copies of the following titles were distributed: Medal of Honor: Profiles of America's Military Heroes from the Civil War to the Present, by Allen Mikaelian, with commentary by Mike Wallace (Hyperion); Henry V, by William Shakespeare (Dover); The Art of War, by Sun Tzu (Dover); Wry Martinis, by Christopher Buckley (Random House); and One Thousand and One Nights, translated by Geraldine McCaughrean (Oxford University Press).

[41][42][43] In 2004, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Dana Gioia, and the poet Marilyn Nelson (the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman), conceived an idea to encourage military personnel and their loved ones to write about their wartime experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The NEA also held writing workshops on military bases across the country, led by best selling authors like Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Jeff Shaara, and Bobbie Ann Mason.

Carroll also 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.

[48][49][50][51] The sites are related to a broad range of subjects, including archaeology, art, Civil Rights, immigration, inventions, law, medical breakthroughs and discoveries, the military, religion, and science, with a special emphasis on forgotten women and minorities.

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.

[57][58] The play has been performed nationwide, including at the Kirk Douglas Theatre[59][60] and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.[58][61][62] If All the Sky Were Paper has starred Oscar and Emmy-winning actors and other notable performers, among them: Laura Dern, Common, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Asner, Brad Hall, Gary Cole, Annette Bening, Jason Hall, and Michael Conner Humphreys, who played a young Forrest Gump in the 1994 film Forrest Gump and then went on to join the Army in 2004.

[71] To commemorate the 100th anniversary of America's entry into the First World War, Carroll also helped to curate, with the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, an exhibit that opened in April 2017 and was titled My Fellow Soldiers.