Ian W. Toll is a writer and independent scholar.  He is the author of four highly regarded works of American military history:  Six Frigates, Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods.  The latter three titles are a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific War. 

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Six Frigates was the 2007 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature, the William E. Colby Military Writers Award, and was placed on the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” list.  Pacific Crucible received the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012.  The Conquering Tide was a New York Times bestseller and was named the best book of 2016 by the editor of the Financial Times.  In 2019, Toll received the Samuel Eliot Morison Award from the USS Constitution Museum.

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Toll has been widely published in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.  He has been a regular reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books.  His books on the Pacific War have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Dutch.  Toll has spoken at venues and institutions throughout the United States, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Treasury Department, the National World War II Museum, and the U.S. Naval Academy.  He has 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.  Toll has also been interviewed on many national and local television and radio programs, including NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, WAMC’s Roundtable, CSPAN’s Book TV, and innumerable commercial radio programs throughout the U.S.A.   

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Prior to beginning work on Six Frigates in 2002, Toll was a Wall Street analyst (1997-2001), a Federal Reserve financial analyst (1995-1997), and a political aide and speechwriter (1989-1993). 

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Toll received an undergraduate degree (B.A.) in American History at Georgetown University (1989) and a Masters in Public Policy (M.P.P.) from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (1995).  Toll and his family live in New York City.