John Toland (historian)


John Willard Toland was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun.

Biography

Toland was born in 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He graduated from Williams College and attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between college years, he traveled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which were performed. He recalled in 1961 that in his early years as a writer he had been "about as big a failure as a man can be". He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before completing his first sale, a short story for which The American Magazine paid $165 in 1954. At one point he managed to get an article on dirigibles into LOOK magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. Dirigibles were the subject of his first full-length published book, Ships in the Sky.
His most important work may be The Rising Sun, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1971. Based on original and extensive interviews with high-ranking Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles the Empire of Japan from the military rebellion of February 1936 to the end of World War II. It won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the Pacific War from the Japanese point of view, rather than the prevailing American one.

Novels

While predominantly a writer of nonfiction, Toland also published two historical novels, Gods of War and Occupation. He says in his 1997 autobiography that he earned little money from his prize-winner The Rising Sun but was set for life from the earnings of Adolf Hitler, for which he also did original research.
Toland died of pneumonia on January 4, 2004, at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut.

Books