John Toland (author)

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For other uses, see John Toland (disambiguation).

John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin - January 4, 2004 in Danbury, Connecticut) was an American author and historian. He is best known for his biography of Adolf Hitler.

However, perhaps his most important work, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, is The Rising Sun. Based on original and extensive interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles Imperial Japan from its Manchurian involvement following World War I 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 war in the Pacific from the Japanese point of view, rather than from an American perspective.

For example, the stories of the battles for the stepping stones to Japan, the islands in the Pacific which had come under Japanese domination, are told from the perspective of the commander sitting in his cave rather than from that of the heroic forces engaged in the assault. Most of these commanders committed suicide at the conclusion of the battle, but Toland was able to reconstruct their viewpoint from letters to their wives and from reports they sent to Tokyo.

Toland tried to write history as a straightforward narrative, with minimal analysis or judgement. This method may have stemmed from his original goal of becoming a playwright. In the summers between his college years, he travelled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which achieved the stage. At one point he managed to publish and article on dirigibles in the old Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian.

One exception to his general approach is his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath about the Pearl Harbor attack and the investigations of it, in which he wrote about evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance of plans to attack the naval base but remained silent. The book was widely criticized at the time. Since the original publication, Toland added new evidence and rebutted early critics. Also, a anonymous source, known as "Seaman Z" (Robert D. Ogg) has since come forth to publicly tell his story.

He died in 2004 of pneumonia.

While predominantly a non-fiction author, Toland also wrote two historical novels, Gods of War and Occupation. He says in his autobiography that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning, "The Rising Sun", but was set for life from the earnings of his biography of Hitler, for which he also did original research.

1 Books
2 References
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Books

Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, ISBN 0-385-42053-6.
Battle: The Story of the Bulge
But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor
Captured by History: One Man's Vision of Our Tumultuous Century
The Dillinger Days
Gods of War
The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs & Disasters
In Mortal Combat: Korea 1950-1953
Infamy: Pearl Harbor And Its Aftermath
The Last 100 Days: The Tumultuous and Controversial Story of the Final Days of World War II in Europe
No Man's Land: 1918, The Last Year of the Great War
Occupation
The Flying Tigers - Copywrited 1963 First Printing From Laurel-Leaf Books 1979. Published by Dell Publishing 0-440-92621-1
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, ISBN 0-8129-6858-1.