Ian W. Toll


Ian W. Toll is an American author and military historian. He lives in New York City.

Education

Toll graduated from St George's School in Middletown, RI, received a degree in history from Georgetown University in 1989, and a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1995.

Career

Early in his career, he was a political aide and speechwriter to U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes and New York Lieutenant Governor Stan Lundine. Subsequently, Toll was an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and an equity research analyst at three investment banks, covering communications, software, and e-commerce stocks.
Toll is the author of ; Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942; and The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944. The latter two titles are the first two volumes of a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific War. The third and final volume in the trilogy,Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945, will be published in September 2020.
Toll has also served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Humanities, a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, and a lecturer at the Naval War College.

Awards

Six Frigates was the 2007 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and the William E. Colby Military Writers Award.
Pacific Crucible received the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012.
The Conquering Tide was a New York Times bestseller and was selected as the best book of 2016 by Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.
In 2019, Toll was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Award by the USS Constitution Museum.

Books