Rejected ASE titles included George Santayana's The Last Puritan, considered to be vaguely antidemocratic; and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, because of its anti-Mormon rhetoric. Louis Adamic's Native's Return was thought to contain passages sympathetic to communism, causing congressman George A. Dondero to attack the ASE program for distributing communist propaganda--in fact, Louis Adamic had removed the controversial passages before the book was reprinted as an ASE.

Armed Services Editions that fell under a temporary ban included Yankee From Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; Charles A. Beard's history of the United States, The Republic; and Sumner Welles' opinionated The Time for Decision.

In this amusing letter, E. B. White recalls the joy he felt when his own collection of humorous essays, entitled One Man's Meat, fell under the ban.

In preparation for this exhibition, the curator wrote to a number of public figures who served in the Armed Forces during World War II, to ask for their recollections about ASE's. One of the fullest and most interesting replies came from writer James A. Michener. In his letter, Michener writes of his fondness for John P. Marquand's novel, The Late George Apley. He also notes that Kenneth Roberts's historical novels, such as Northwest Passage, later influenced his own.

The ASE's had an enormous impact on many of the servicemen who read them. In his letter to the curator of this exhibition, Congressman John D. Dingell points out that the ASE's were a welcome diversion to the "huge amount of hard work and boredom" many servicemen faced.

In contrast to that of Congressman Dingell, Virginia State Senator Madison Marye's recollections of ASE's are probably more typical of those who fought in the war. Many veterans simply do not remember these books, and Senator Marye's letter offers a simple explanation why this should be so.

Frederik Pohl was influenced by the ASE's in a more subtle way than Michener. Pohl writes that Gray and Lieber's Education of T.C. Mits introduced him to "the wonderful world of logic." Note Pohl's interesting comment connecting ASE's with Ian Ballantine, founder of Bantam Books and one of the leading figures in the postwar paperback industry.

Servicemen like Mitchell Van Yahres (now a member of the House of Delegates in the Virginia Assembly), who served on the home front, were less likely to run into the ASE's than those who were sent abroad. The ASE's were primarily targeted at overseas GI's who were likely to have trouble obtaining reading material through regular channels.

Like Mr. Van Yahres, actor Jack Lemmon did not encounter ASE's for geographical reasons: Mr. Lemmon's war was spent in the ROTC at Harvard.

More troubling is the case of Andrew Rooney (now a CBS newsman) who suspects that the ASE's were not shipped to the part of Europe where he was stationed. The ASE's largely succeeded in the areas where the earlier Victory Book Campaign had failed, but both projects suffered from distribution problems. The mobility of troops, the difficulty in ascertaining accurate addresses overseas, and the understandable complications that arose from shipping millions of books to foreign parts of a world at war causes one to suspect that, at least in some cases, the ASE's simply never arrived.

Not all servicemen read ASE's. As the popularity of ASE short story collections can attest, many GI's preferred magazine articles to long books. In his letter to the curator of this exhibition, newspaperman Ben Bradlee notes that the pocket editions of Newsweek, Time, and the New Yorker were "an incredible lifeline." The Council on Books in Wartime dealt primarily with books, and the only magazine-related material the ASE's boasted were collections of excerpts from The New Yorker.

This letter from James Stewart's office reminds us that many of those who remembered the ASE's have died or are now in poor health. The average soldier in World War II was 26 year old; a person who was 26 at war's end would be 77 years old today.