Ian W. Toll

Ian W. Toll (born 1967) is an American author and military historian who lives in New York City. He wrote The Pacific War Trilogy, a three-volume history of the Pacific War.

Education Toll graduated from St George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island. He then studied and received a degree in history from Georgetown University in 1989.

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. Twilight of the Gods was a New York Times bestseller in 2020.

In 2019, Toll was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Award by the USS Constitution Museum.

Books Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, W. W. Norton, 2006. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942, W. W. Norton, 2011. The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944, W. W. Norton, 2015. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944–1945, W. W. Norton, 2020.