Record date:
Andrew Carroll, My Fellow Soldiers
Bestselling author Andrew Carroll visits the Museum & Library to talk about his newest book–a vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War One. Sponsored by the World War One Centennial Commission.
At the heart of this stunning work of narrative history is an intimate portrait of the iconic general John Pershing, the U.S. commander in Europe. With many thanks to Carroll, who has made it his life’s mission to raise public awareness about the need to find and preserve war letters and diaries, a rich trove of the general’s letters was discovered. And while Pershing provides the heart of this story, he is one in a chorus of American voices that unfold to make the high stakes of our involvement in World War I piercingly real.
The scope of the challenges facing Pershing in WWI was truly remarkable. His military force on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, but the general surmounted enormous obstacles to command millions of American soldiers to decisive triumphs. Often misunderstood as a starchy, even wooden leader, these new letters reveal an emotionally vulnerable man whose personal tragedy kept him focused on victory. Almost two years before going to war, Pershing’s beloved wife and three young daughters perished in a house fire; only his six-year-old son Warren survived. Leaving his young son for war was hard on Pershing, but even as he steered the American war effort he always found time to write his son heartfelt letters from the front.
Woven throughout Pershing’s story are the experiences of an extraordinary group of American men and women, gathered by Carroll from a stunning cross-section of stories and letters, from both the famous and unheralded, including a young Harry Truman, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Teddy Roosevelt, and his 20-year-old son Quentin, who was killed in the war. For many of the men and women who served overseas the war was an exhilarating experience that brought honors and adulation; for others, it was a nightmare they refused to discuss publicly but wrote about with great poignancy in their private letters and diaries. With My Fellow Soldiers, never before has the war’s profound impact on America been conveyed with such humanity and emotional force.
ANDREW CARROLL is best known as the author of the 1999 New York Times best-selling Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters and the 2001 New York Times best-selling book War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, which was later turned into an episode of the television program American Experience.
A 1993 magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, Carroll has received, among other accolades, the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Medal of Honor; The Order of Saint Maurice, bestowed by the National Infantryman's Association; and The Free Spirit Award, presented by the Freedom Forum. Carroll is also the founding director of the Center for American War Letters www.WarLetters.us at Chapman University, and he lives in Orange, CA and Washington, D.C.
