Name John Toland Role Writer | Education Williams College | |
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Died January 4, 2004, Danbury, Connecticut, United States Awards Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction Books The Rising Sun, The Last 100 Days, Infamy: Pearl Harbor a, The Dillinger days, In Mortal Combat | ||
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John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 – January 4, 2004) 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.
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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 (1957).
His most important work may be The Rising Sun (Random House, 1970), 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 American).
Toland generally tried to write history works as a straightforward narrative, with minimal analysis or judgment. One exception to his general approach is Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, about the Pearl Harbor attack and its subsequent investigation, where he presented evidence that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance of plans to attack the naval base but remained silent. The book was widely criticized at the time, and today the majority of historians reject the Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory.
While predominantly a writer of nonfiction, Toland also wrote 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.