Even before he could read, Andrew Carroll was a reader. "My mom recently told me that even as a toddler, I would open just about any book I found and pretend to read the pages," he says. Curious George was an inspiration: the little monkey turned a young Andrew into same, forever seeking (and finding) mischief.

Reading that book was to be the first of a lifetime of epiphanies gleaned from reading, and of experiencing passages not just intellectually but viscerally. The final stanza of Anna Akhmatova’s poem "Lot’s Wife" had such an effect. "Akhmatova takes this unnamed, seemingly wicked character from the Bible who’s been essentially stripped of her humanity and transforms her into a real individual, a heroic soul even, who risks everything to have one final glance at the home where she raised her children," says Andrew, quoting the passage: ‘She’s seen as a kind of loss, and yet/who will grieve for this woman, cry for this wife/But I alone will never forget/for a single look, she gave up her life.’

"I remember literally gasping the first time I read that."

Poetry is the genre whose work Andrew is most likely to re-read, which is fitting, since he was the founder and the fire behind a national literacy project that used American poetry to foster reading. "It’s exhilarating to unearth something new in a poem I thought I had already mined for every last treasure," he says. He seldom revisits other works, though, citing the common lament among serious readers of so many other pages still left unturned—"Moby-Dick and Brothers Karamazov being two of the most embarrassing examples."

But he has also discovered another kind of literature, almost single-handedly turning it into its own reading genre: the letter. Since his first New York Times bestseller in 1997, Letters of a Nation, Andrew has waged a crusade to find, publish and preserve the letters of all manner of heroes, from Civil War slaves to Iraq war soldiers.

He calls these letters "the great undiscovered literature of America," and has witnessed how its transformative power touches not just the reader but the author. Through Andrew’s collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts on the Operation Homecoming initiative, he helps the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan find their voice through poetry, journals or short stories. The underlying thread that weaves these very personal narratives together is the universal ability of literature to foster empathy. Says Andrew: "I’ve always loved Longfellow’s quote, ‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man’s life a sorrow and a suffering to disarm all hostility.’"

Transformation and epiphany: for Andrew, these are the hallmarks of reading. "I believe literature ignites a greater passion for life," he says. "It fosters curiosity and catharsis, and it encourages us to perceive the world in new ways. Perhaps it’s all biological—the brief, intoxicating rush of a synaptic surge in the mind when we learn something new."

The challenge is to preserve these moments before they become as rare as a handwritten letter. "I am terrified that as attention spans get shorter and as our national discourse on major issues is little more than lightning-round shouting matches between extremists, we are losing the ability to approach life and its challenges from a more complex and nuanced perspective," he says. "Not all issues can be solved instantly and not all problems need be framed in an ‘us versus them’ dynamic.

"Books are not a panacea, and obviously there are literature-loving villains out there as well as wise souls who’ve never cracked open a novel. But for the most part," says Andrew, "a society works best when it values reading, intellectual curiosity, and respect for different opinions."