Ian Toll

Ian W. Toll is a writer and independent scholar. He is the author of several highly-regarded works of military history: Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy, and The Pacific War Trilogy, a three-volume history of the war in the Pacific. Six Frigates was the 2007 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and the William E. Colby Military Writers Award.

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. 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.  In 2019, Toll received the Samuel Eliot Morison Award from the USS Constitution Museum.