| 2025 | Winner | One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Omar El Akkad | Knopf |
| 2025 | Finalist | Things in Nature Merely Grow | Yiyun Li | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2025 | Finalist | When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World | Jordan Thomas | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy | Julia Ioffe | Ecco |
| 2025 | Finalist | Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care | Claudia Rowe | Abrams Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling | Jason De León | Viking |
| 2024 | Finalist | Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder | Salman Rushdie | Random House |
| 2024 | Finalist | Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church | Eliza Griswold | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Finalist | Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia | Kate Manne | Crown |
| 2024 | Finalist | Whiskey Tender | Deborah Jackson Taffa | Harper |
| 2023 | Winner | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Ned Blackhawk | Yale University Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Ordinary Notes | Christina Sharpe | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2023 | Finalist | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | John Vaillant | Knopf |
| 2023 | Finalist | Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice | Cristina Rivera Garza | Hogarth |
| 2023 | Finalist | We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir | Raja Shehadeh | Other Press |
| 2022 | Winner | South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation | Imani Perry | HarperCollins |
| 2022 | Finalist | Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus | David Quammen | Simon & Schuster |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir | Ingrid Rojas Contreras | Doubleday |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness | Meghan O’Rourke | Riverhead Books |
| 2022 | Finalist | His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice | Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa | Viking |
| 2021 | Winner | All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake | Tiya Miles | Random House |
| 2021 | Finalist | Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America | Nicole Eustace | Liveright |
| 2021 | Finalist | A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance | Hanif Abdurraqib | Random House |
| 2021 | Finalist | Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains | Lucas Bessire | Princeton University Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | Tastes Like War: A Memoir | Grace M. Cho | Feminist Press |
| 2020 | Winner | The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X | Les Payne, Tamara Payne | Liveright |
| 2020 | Finalist | Unworthy Republic: The dispossession of Native Americans and the road to Indian Territory | Claudio Saunt | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Undocumented Americans | Karla Cornejo Villavicencio | One World |
| 2020 | Finalist | My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir | Jenn Shapland | Tin House |
| 2020 | Finalist | How To Make a Slave and Other Essays | Jerald Walker | Mad Creek Books |
| 2019 | Winner | The Yellow House | Sarah M. Broom | Grove Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance | Carolyn Forché | Penguin Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | David Treuer | Riverhead Books |
| 2019 | Finalist | Thick: And Other Essays | Tressie McMillan Cottom | The New Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Solitary | Albert Woodfox with Leslie George | Grove Press |
| 2018 | Winner | The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke | Jeffrey C. Stewart | Oxford University Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights | Adam Winkler | Liveright |
| 2018 | Finalist | American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic | Victoria Johnson | Liveright |
| 2018 | Finalist | Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth | Sarah Smarsh | Scribner |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation | Colin G. Calloway | Oxford University Press |
| 2017 | Winner | The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia | Masha Gessen | Riverhead Books |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Frances FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster |
| 2017 | Finalist | Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI | David Grann | Doubleday |
| 2017 | Finalist | Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America | Nancy MacLean | Viking |
| 2017 | Finalist | Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge | Erica Armstrong Dunbar | 37 Ink |
| 2016 | Winner | Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America | Ibram X. Kendi | Nation Books |
| 2016 | Finalist | Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy | Heather Ann Thompson | Pantheon |
| 2016 | Finalist | Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Harvard University Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America | Andrés Reséndez | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2016 | Finalist | Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right | Arlie Russell Hochschild | The New Press |
| 2015 | Winner | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2015 | Finalist | Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs | Sally Mann | Little, Brown |
| 2015 | Finalist | If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran | Carla Power | Henry Holt |
| 2015 | Finalist | Ordinary Light: A Memoir | Tracy K. Smith | Knopf |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness | Sy Montgomery | Simon & Schuster |
| 2014 | Winner | Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China | Evan Osnos | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2014 | Finalist | Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? | Roz Chast | Bloomsbury USA |
| 2014 | Finalist | No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes | Anand Gopal | Metropolitan Books |
| 2014 | Finalist | Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh | John Lahr | W. W. Norton |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Meaning of Human Existence | E.O. Wilson | Liveright |
| 2013 | Winner | The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America | George Packer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2013 | Finalist | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Jill Lepore | Knopf |
| 2013 | Finalist | Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Lawrence Wright | Vintage Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields | Wendy Lower | Chatto & Windus |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 | Alan Taylor | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Winner | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2012 | Finalist | House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East | Anthony Shadid | HarperCollins |
| 2012 | Finalist | Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Boy Kings of Texas | Domingo Martinez | Unknown |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Robert A. Caro | Knopf |
| 2011 | Winner | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Finalist | Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution | Mary Gabriel | Little, Brown |
| 2011 | Finalist | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Manning Marable | Viking |
| 2011 | Finalist | Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love & Fallout | Lauren Redniss | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism | Deborah Baker | Graywolf Press |
| 2010 | Winner | Just Kids | Patti Smith | Bloomsbury |
| 2010 | Finalist | Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq | John W. Dower | W. W. Norton |
| 2010 | Finalist | Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War | Megan K. Stack | Bloomsbury |
| 2010 | Finalist | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2010 | Finalist | Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade | Justin Spring | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2009 | Winner | The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt | T. J. Stiles | Vintage Books |
| 2009 | Finalist | Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook | David M. Carroll | Unknown |
| 2009 | Finalist | Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2009 | Finalist | Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species | Sean B. Carroll | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy | Adrienne Mayor | Princeton University Press |
| 2008 | Winner | The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Annette Gordon-Reed | W. W. Norton |
| 2008 | Finalist | Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives | Jim Sheeler | Penguin Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | Jane Mayer | Doubleday |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order | Joan Wickersham | Harcourt |
| 2008 | Finalist | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Vintage Books |
| 2007 | Winner | Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | Tim Weiner | Doubleday |
| 2007 | Finalist | Brother, I'm Dying | Edwidge Danticat | Knopf |
| 2007 | Finalist | God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | Christopher Hitchens | Grand Central Publishing |
| 2007 | Finalist | Ralph Ellison: A Biography | Arnold Rampersad | Knopf |
| 2007 | Finalist | Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution | Woody Holton | Macmillan |
| 2006 | Winner | The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl | Timothy Egan | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968 | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 2006 | Finalist | Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone | Rajiv Chandrasekaran | Knopf |
| 2006 | Finalist | Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present | Peter Hessler | Harper Perennial |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Lawrence Wright | Knopf |
| 2005 | Winner | The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion | Random House |
| 2005 | Finalist | 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers | Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn | Times Books |
| 2005 | Finalist | Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves | Adam Hochschild | Houghton Mifflin |
| 2005 | Finalist | Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius | Leo Damrosch | Houghton Mifflin |
| 2005 | Finalist | Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion | Alan Burdick | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2004 | Winner | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age | Kevin Boyle | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2004 | Finalist | 9/11 Commission Report | 9/11 Commission | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett | Jennifer Gonnerman | Picador |
| 2004 | Finalist | Washington's Crossing | David Hackett Fischer | Oxford University Press |
| 2004 | Finalist | Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2003 | Winner | Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy | Carlos Eire | Free Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2003 | Finalist | Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin | John D'Emilio | Free Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home | George Howe Colt | Unknown |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America | Erik Larson | Vintage Books |
| 2002 | Winner | Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3 | Robert A. Caro | Knopf |
| 2002 | Finalist | Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science | Atul Gawande | Metropolitan Books |
| 2002 | Finalist | Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes | Steve Olson | Bloomsbury |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Last American Man | Elizabeth Gilbert | Bloomsbury |
| 2002 | Finalist | When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution | Devra Davis | Basic Books |
| 2001 | Winner | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression | Andrew Solomon | Scribner |
| 2001 | Finalist | American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood | Marie Arana | Unknown |
| 2001 | Finalist | My Story as Told by Water | David James Duncan | Unknown |
| 2001 | Finalist | Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland | Jan T. Gross | Princeton University Press |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care | Nina Bernstein | Pantheon |
| 2000 | Winner | In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex | Nathaniel Philbrick | Penguin Books |
| 2000 | Finalist | Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon | Patrick Tierney | W. W. Norton |
| 2000 | Finalist | From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present | Jacques Barzun | Unknown |
| 2000 | Finalist | The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach | Alice Kaplan | University of Chicago Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt and Company |
| 1999 | Winner | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | John W. Dower | The New Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War | Mark Bowden | Bantam Books |
| 1999 | Finalist | Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation | John Phillip Santos | Penguin Books |
| 1999 | Finalist | Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette | Judith Thurman | Bloomsbury |
| 1999 | Finalist | Woman: An Intimate Geography | Natalie Angier | Virago |
| 1998 | Winner | Slaves in the Family | Edward Ball | Ballantine Books |
| 1998 | Finalist | A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage | Beth Kephart | Unknown |
| 1998 | Finalist | All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery | Henry Mayer | W. W. Norton |
| 1998 | Finalist | Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human | Harold Bloom | Fourth Estate |
| 1998 | Finalist | There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok | Yaffa Eliach | Back Bay Books |
| 1997 | Winner | American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson | Joseph J. Ellis | Knopf |
| 1997 | Finalist | My Brother | Jamaica Kincaid | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1997 | Finalist | The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara | David I. Kertzer | Knopf |
| 1997 | Finalist | The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade | Thomas Lynch | Jonathan Cape |
| 1997 | Finalist | Whittaker Chambers: A Biography | Sam Tanenhaus | Random House |
| 1996 | Winner | An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us | James P. Carroll | Unknown |
| 1996 | Finalist | Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World | Anne Roiphe | Unknown |
| 1996 | Finalist | The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958 | Cary Reich | Doubleday |
| 1996 | Finalist | The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War | Paul Hendrickson | Unknown |
| 1996 | Finalist | The Temple Bombing | Melissa Fay Greene | Unknown |
| 1995 | Winner | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism | Tina Rosenberg | Random House |
| 1995 | Finalist | A Civil Action | Jonathan Harr | Random House |
| 1995 | Finalist | Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life | Daniel C. Dennett | Simon & Schuster |
| 1995 | Finalist | Ghosts of Mississippi | Maryanne Vollers | Little, Brown |
| 1995 | Finalist | Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia | Dennis Covington | Unknown |
| 1994 | Winner | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Sherwin B. Nuland | Knopf |
| 1994 | Finalist | Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers, Sons, Race and Society | John Edgar Wideman | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | In Pharoah's Army: Memories of the Lost War | Tobias Wolff | Knopf |
| 1994 | Finalist | Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas | Jane Mayer, Jill Abramson | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | John Putnam Demos | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Winner | United States: Essays 1952–1992 | Gore Vidal | Crown |
| 1993 | Finalist | Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground | Peter Svenson | Ballantine Books |
| 1993 | Finalist | Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America | Richard Slotkin | Unknown |
| 1993 | Finalist | Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture | William Leach | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Finalist | W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt |
| 1992 | Winner | Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story | Paul Monette | Open Road Integrated Media |
| 1992 | Finalist | Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman | James Gleick | Little, Brown |
| 1992 | Finalist | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Garry Wills | Simon & Schuster |
| 1992 | Finalist | The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction | Edward L. Ayers | Oxford University Press |
| 1992 | Finalist | Truman | David McCullough | Simon & Schuster |
| 1991 | Winner | Freedom, Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture | Orlando Patterson | Basic Books |
| 1991 | Finalist | Anne Sexton: A Biography | Diane Wood Middlebrook | Virago |
| 1991 | Finalist | Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-Fiction | Melissa Fay Greene | Secker & Warburg |
| 1991 | Finalist | The Jameses: A Family Narrative | R.W.B. Lewis | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1991 | Finalist | Why Americans Hate Politics: The Death of the Democratic Process | E. J. Dionne, Jr. | Simon & Schuster |
| 1990 | Winner | The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance | Ron Chernow | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 1990 | Finalist | Jackson Pollock: An American Saga | Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith | Woodward/White |
| 1990 | Finalist | Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician | Roger Morris | Henry Holt and Company |
| 1990 | Finalist | Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1847–1952 | T.H. Watkins | Unknown |
| 1990 | Finalist | Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School | Samuel G. Freedman | Unknown |
| 1989 | Winner | From Beirut to Jerusalem | Thomas L. Friedman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1989 | Finalist | Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends | William Pfaff | Noonday Press |
| 1989 | Finalist | Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years | McGeorge Bundy | Random House |
| 1989 | Finalist | Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution | Marilynne Robinson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1989 | Finalist | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 1988 | Winner | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Neil Sheehan | Random House |
| 1988 | Finalist | Freud: A Life for Our Time | Peter Gay | Unknown |
| 1988 | Finalist | Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder | Jack McLaughlin | Henry Holt and Company |
| 1988 | Finalist | Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom | Brenda Maddox | Mariner Books |
| 1988 | Finalist | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 | Eric Foner | HarperCollins |
| 1987 | Winner | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | Simon & Schuster |
| 1987 | Finalist | Chaos: Making a New Science | James Gleick | Viking |
| 1987 | Finalist | Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe | David Herbert Donald | Bloomsbury |
| 1987 | Finalist | Mothers in the Fatherland | Claudia Koonz | Unknown |
| 1987 | Finalist | New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars | Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin,, Thomas Mellins | Unknown |
| 1986 | Winner | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape | Barry Lopez | Scribner |
| 1986 | Finalist | The Paper: The Life and Times of the New York Herald Tribune | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1986 | Finalist | The Young Hemingway | Michael S. Reynolds | Unknown |
| 1986 | Finalist | Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter | Theodore Rosengarten | William Morrow |
| 1986 | Finalist | War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | John W. Dower | Pantheon |
| 1985 | Winner | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | J. Anthony Lukas | Knopf |
| 1985 | Finalist | ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age | Walter A. McDougall | Basic Books |
| 1985 | Finalist | In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Use of Human Heredity | Daniel J. Kevles | Unknown |
| 1984 | Winner | Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 | Robert V. Remini | Harper & Row |
| 1984 | Finalist | Becoming William James | Howard M. Feinstein | Cornell University Press |
| 1984 | Finalist | One Writer’s Beginnings | Eudora Welty | Harvard University Press |
| 1984 | Finalist | The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka | Ernst Pawel | Noonday Press |
| 1984 | Finalist | Thomas More: A Biography | Richard Marius | Unknown |
| 1979 | Winner | The Snow Leopard | Peter Matthiessen | Penguin Books |
| 1979 | Finalist | Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2) | Meyer Schapiro | George Braziller |
| 1979 | Finalist | New York Jew | Alfred Kazin | Knopf |
| 1979 | Finalist | Stable Peace | Kenneth E. Boulding | Unknown |
| 1979 | Finalist | This House of Sky: Landscapes of the Western Wind | Ivan Doig | Unknown |
| 1978 | Winner | Winners and Losers | Gloria Emerson | Random House |
| 1978 | Finalist | Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood | Kai T. Erikson | Simon & Schuster |
| 1978 | Finalist | Pink Collar Workers | Louise Kapp Howe | Avon Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind | Julian Jaynes | Unknown |
| 1978 | Finalist | The Vast Majority | Michael Harrington | Unknown |
| 1977 | Winner | The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales | Bruno Bettelheim | Thames & Hudson |
| 1977 | Finalist | Awakening from the American Dream | Rufus E. Miles, Jr. | Unknown |
| 1977 | Finalist | Dostoyevsky: A Writer in His Time | Joseph Frank | Unknown |
| 1977 | Finalist | Kicked a Building Lately? | Ada Louise Huxtable | Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. |
| 1977 | Finalist | The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise | Dorothy Dinnerstein | HarperCollins |
| 1976 | Co-winner | Passage to Ararat | Michael J. Arlen | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1976 | Co-winner | The Great War and Modern Memory | Paul Fussell | Oxford University Press |
| 1976 | Finalist | A Time to Die | Tim Wicker | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations | Richard Barnet, Ronald E. Muller | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Michelangelo's Last Paintings | Leo Steinberg | Oxford University Press |
| 1976 | Finalist | Minamata | W. Eugene Smith, Aileen M. Smith | Chatto & Windus |
| 1976 | Finalist | Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko | Robert Rosenblum | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went | John Kenneth Galbraith | Penguin Books |
| 1976 | Finalist | Njinsky Dancing | Lincoln Kirstein | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change | Peter L. Berger | Basic Books |
| 1976 | Finalist | The Female Imagination | Patricia Meyer Spacks | Routledge |
| 1976 | Finalist | The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination | Lawrence L. Langer | Yale University Press |
| 1975 | Co-winner | All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw | Theodore Rosengarten | Unknown |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Anarchy, State, and Utopia | Robert Nozick | Blackwell Publishing |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Interpretation of Schizophrenia | Silvano Arieti | R. Brunner |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Marcel Proust | Roger Shattuck | Princeton University Press |
| 1975 | Co-winner | The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher | Lewis Thomas | Bantam Books |
| 1975 | Finalist | 16 Studies | H. W. Janson | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | All the President's Men | Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward | Warner Books |
| 1975 | Finalist | Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse | Joe Eszterhas | Random House |
| 1975 | Finalist | Continents in Motion: The New Earth Debate | Walter S. Sullivan | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity | Howard E. Gruber, Paul H. Barrett | Harvard University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Egon Schiele's Portraits | Alessandra Comini | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham | Calvin Bedient | Oxford University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Einstein and the Generation of Science | Lewis Feuer | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Essays on Music in the Western World | Oliver Strunk | W. W. Norton |
| 1975 | Finalist | Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth | Raoul Berger | Harvard University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism | Rosemary Radford Ruether | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887–1915 | J. L. Heilbron | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins | Dorothy B. Vitaliano | Indiana University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero | Eleanor Perényi | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater | Marjorie L. Hoover | University of Massachusetts Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Muscle and Blood | Rachel Scott | Dutton |
| 1975 | Finalist | Myths, Models and Paradigms | Ian Barbour | HarperCollins |
| 1975 | Finalist | Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View | Stanley Milgram | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians | Barbara Myerhoff | Cornell University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Religion and Revolution | Guenter Lewy | Oxford University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | Religious America | Philip Garvin, Julia Welch | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Seduction and Betrayal | Elizabeth Hardwick | Vintage Books |
| 1975 | Finalist | Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion | Leonard E. Barrett | Anchor |
| 1975 | Finalist | Style in History | Peter Gay | W. W. Norton |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Black Book | Middleton A. Harris with others | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Chasm: The Life and Death of a Great Experiment in Ghetto Education | Robert Jean Campbell, M.D. | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Curve of Binding Energy | John McPhee | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics | Franz Schurmann | Pantheon |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke | Richard Gilman | Yale University Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity | John Murray Cuddihy | Basic Books |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York | Robert A. Caro | Random House Canada |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Spirit of Eastern Christendom 600–1700 | Jaroslav Pelikan | University of Chicago Press |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Voyages of Apollo: The Exploration of the Moon | Richard S. Lewis | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | The Working Class Majority | Andrew Levinson | Unknown |
| 1975 | Finalist | Working | Studs Terkel | Avon Books |
| 1975 | Finalist | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values | Robert M. Pirsig | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Deeper into Movies | Pauline Kael | Warner Books |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks | Maurice Natanson | Northwestern University Press |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Life: The Unfinished Experiment | S. E. Luria | Souvenir Press |
| 1974 | Co-winner | The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. | Murray Kempton | Dutton |
| 1974 | Finalist | A Decade of Music | B. H. Haggin | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 | Kevin Starr | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean Dialogue | J. M. Jauch | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Autumn of the Eagle | George Laycock | Scribner |
| 1974 | Finalist | Behavior: The Control of Perception | William T. Powers | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Deaths of Man | Edwin S. Shneidman | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Desert: The American Southwest | Ruth Kirk, Louis Kirk | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Economics and the Public Purpose | John Kenneth Galbraith | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1974 | Finalist | Einstein | Jeremy Bernstein | William Collins |
| 1974 | Finalist | Elie Nadelman | Lincoln Kirstein | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations | Leonard B. Meyer | University of California Press |
| 1974 | Finalist | Forewords and Afterwords | W. H. Auden | Vintage Books |
| 1974 | Finalist | Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives | Don Browning | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Genetic Diversity and Human Equality | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Basic Books |
| 1974 | Finalist | Genetic Fix: The Next Technological Revolution | Amitai Etzioni | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations | Richard Ellmann | Oxford University Press |
| 1974 | Finalist | History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought | Frederic Wakeman | University of California Press |
| 1974 | Finalist | Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners | Robert Jay Lifton | Simon & Schuster |
| 1974 | Finalist | In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt | Vivian Gornick | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America | Walter Karp | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Jean-Paul Sartre | Marjorie Grene | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business | Jessica Mitford | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. II | Suzanne K. Langer | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Pentimento: A Book of Portraits | Lillian Hellman | Macmillan |
| 1974 | Finalist | Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World | Larzer Ziff | Viking |
| 1974 | Finalist | Sixties Going on Seventies (Perspectives on the Sixties) | Nora Sayre | Rutgers University Press |
| 1974 | Finalist | Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 1 | Harry Austryn Wolfson | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands | Robert I. Levy | University of Chicago Press |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness | Erich Fromm | Jonathan Cape |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America | Laurence Veysey | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory | Trent Schroyer | George Braziller |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Imperial Presidency | Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Inspector | Saul Steinberg | Penguin Books |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Saturday Night Special and Other Guns | Robert Sherrill | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion | Harvey Cox | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience | Peter Davies | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War | Daniel Aaron | Unknown |
| 1974 | Finalist | Walking the Dead Diamond River | Edward Hoagland | Unknown |
| 1973 | Co-winner | A Religious History of the American People | S. E. Ahlstrom | Yale University Press |
| 1973 | Co-winner | Diderot | Arthur M. Wilson | Oxford University Press |
| 1973 | Co-winner | The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations | George B. Schaller | University of Chicago Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 | Alec Wilder | Oxford University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Aquaculture: the farming and husbandry of freshwater and marine organisms | John E. Bardach, John H. Ryther, William O. McLarney | Wiley |
| 1973 | Finalist | Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica | Garry Wills | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion | Garry Wills | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Camus and Sartre | Germaine Brée | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Cancer: The Wayward Cell; its origins, nature, and treatment | Victor Richards, M.D., | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 | Seymour Hersh | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Crisis in Watertown: The Polarization of an American Community | Lynn Eden | University of Michigan Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle | Garrett Hardin | Viking |
| 1973 | Finalist | Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus | Theodore Ziolkowski | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Frances FitzGerald | Little, Brown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Herblock's State of the Union | Herbert Block | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Jean Renoir: The World of His Films | Leo Braudy | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra | Ann Zwinger, Beatrice Willard | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution | Stanley Karnow | Macmillan |
| 1973 | Finalist | Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times | Morris Kline | Oxford University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy | Arthur Danto | Harper |
| 1973 | Finalist | On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art | Vernon Young | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art | Leo Steinberg | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Person and God in a Spanish Valley | William A. Christian | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe | Daniel Hoffman | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Realism | Linda Nochlin | Penguin Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Science and Sentiment in America | Morton White | Oxford University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature | Stanley Fish | University of California Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama | Michael Goldman | Princeton University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | Sincerity and Authenticity | Lionel Trilling | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
| 1973 | Finalist | South to a Very Old Place | Albert Murray | Modern Library |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Almanac of American Politics | Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa, Douglas Matthews | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Best and the Brightest | David Halberstam | Random House |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann | Herman H. Goldstine | Princeton University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks | Harold Rosenberg | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Domination of Nature | William Leiss | McGill-Queen's University Press |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book | Arlene Croce | W. H. Allen |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Hidden Injuries of Class | Richard Sennett, Jonathan Cobb | Vintage Books |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Mountain People | Colin M. Turnbull | Simon & Schuster |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Senses of Walden | Stanley Cavell | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Tree Where Man Was Born | Peter Matthiessen | Dutton |
| 1973 | Finalist | The Will to be Human | Silvano Arieti, M.D. | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Wallace and Natural Selection | H. Lewis McKinney | Unknown |
| 1973 | Finalist | Where the Wasteland Ends | Theodore Roszak | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America | Martin E. Marty | Doubleday |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Blue Whale | George L. Small | Columbia University Press |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven | Charles Rosen | W. W. Norton |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Last Whole Earth Catalogue | Stewart Brand | Unknown |
| 1972 | Finalist | Ballet Chronicle | B. H. Haggin | Unknown |
| 1972 | Finalist | Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel | Norman Fruman | George Braziller |
| 1972 | Finalist | Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature | César Graña | Unknown |
| 1972 | Finalist | Harlem Renaissance | Nathan Huggins | Oxford University Press |
| 1972 | Finalist | Images and Shadows | Iris Origo | John Murray |
| 1972 | Finalist | Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes | Thomas R. Edwards | Unknown |
| 1972 | Finalist | Movies into Films: Film Criticism, 1967–1970 | John Simon | Unknown |
| 1972 | Finalist | Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature | M. H. Abrams | W. W. Norton |
| 1972 | Finalist | Sorties | James Dickey | Doubleday |
| 1971 | Co-winner | Cocteau: A Biography | Francis Steegmuller | Little, Brown |
| 1971 | Co-winner | Science in the British Colonies of America | Raymond Phineas Stearns | University of Illinois Press |
| 1971 | Finalist | Design with Nature | Ian L. McHarg | Unknown |
| 1971 | Finalist | Erik H. Erikson: the Growth of His Work | Robert Coles | Unknown |
| 1971 | Finalist | Life on Man | Theodor Rosebury | Viking |
| 1971 | Finalist | Technological Man | Victor C. Ferkiss | Unknown |
| 1971 | Finalist | The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World | Kenneth Rexroth | Unknown |
| 1971 | Finalist | The Body Has a Head | Gustav Eckstein | Bantam Books |
| 1971 | Finalist | The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power | Lewis Mumford | Unknown |
| 1971 | Finalist | Yeats | Harold Bloom | Oxford University Press |
| 1971 | Finalist | Zelda | Nancy Milford | Unknown |
| 1970 | Co-winner | An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir | Lillian Hellman | Bantam Books |
| 1970 | Co-winner | Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence | Erik Erikson | W. W. Norton |
| 1970 | Finalist | Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 | Richard Howard | Unknown |
| 1970 | Finalist | Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics | Kenneth E. Boulding | Unknown |
| 1970 | Finalist | Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America | Noel Perrin | Atheneum |
| 1970 | Finalist | Love and Will | Rollo May | W. W. Norton |
| 1970 | Finalist | Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship | Gore Vidal | William Heinemann |
| 1970 | Finalist | The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition | Theodore Roszak | Doubleday |
| 1970 | Finalist | The Unexpected Universe | Loren Eiseley | Unknown |
| 1970 | Finalist | Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane | John Unterecker | Unknown |
| 1969 | Co-winner | Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima | Robert Jay Lifton | Random House |
| 1969 | Co-winner | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | Norman Mailer | Unknown |
| 1969 | Finalist | A Portrait of Isaac Newton | Frank E. Manuel | Harvard University Press |
| 1969 | Finalist | George Eliot: A Biography | Gordon S. Haight | Oxford University Press |
| 1969 | Finalist | Men in Dark Times | Hannah Arendt | Unknown |
| 1969 | Finalist | So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events | René Dubos | Scribner |
| 1969 | Finalist | The Crime of Punishment | Karl Menninger, M.D. | Viking |
| 1969 | Finalist | The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA | James D. Watson | Unknown |
| 1969 | Finalist | Victorian Minds | Gertrude Himmelfarb | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 1969 | Finalist | Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider | Peter Gay | HarperCollins |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Death at an Early Age | Jonathan Kozol | Plume |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Selected Essays | William Troy | Rutgers University Press |
| 1968 | Finalist | A Primer of Ignorance | R. P. Blackmur | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | Beardsley: A Biography | Stanley Weintraub | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. II | Suzanne K. Langer | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | Music, the Arts and Ideas | Leonard B. Meyer | University of Chicago Press |
| 1968 | Finalist | Stop-Time | Frank Conroy | Penguin Books |
| 1968 | Finalist | The Biology of Ultimate Concern | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development | Lewis Mumford | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | The New Industrial State | John Kenneth Galbraith | Unknown |
| 1968 | Finalist | The New Poets | M. L. Rosenthal | Unknown |
| 1967 | Co-winner | La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York | Oscar Lewis | Random House |
| 1967 | Co-winner | Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography | Justin Kaplan | Simon & Schuster |
| 1967 | Finalist | Against Interpretation and Other Essays | Susan Sontag | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | Daumier: Man of His Time | Oliver Larkin | Beacon Press |
| 1967 | Finalist | Essays in Economics | Wassily W. Leontief | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | In My Father's Court | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | James Boswell: The Earlier Years | Frederick A. Pottle | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology | Howard B. Adelmann | Cornell University Press |
| 1967 | Finalist | Phenomenological Psychology: The Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus | Erwin Straus | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | Robert Frost: The Early Years | Lawrance Thompson | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| 1967 | Finalist | The Language of Life: An Introduction to the Science of Genetics | George Beadle, Muriel Beadle, | Unknown |
| 1967 | Finalist | The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud | Philip Rieff | Unknown |
| 1966 | Winner | Paris Journal, 1944–1965 | Janet Flanner | Atheneum |
| 1966 | Finalist | "The Love of Anxiety" and Other Essays | Charles Frankel | Harper & Row |
| 1966 | Finalist | A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945–47 | Alice Kimball Smith | Unknown |
| 1966 | Finalist | Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning | Lionel Trilling | Doubleday |
| 1966 | Finalist | Coming of Age in America | Edgar Z. Friedenberg | Vintage Books |
| 1966 | Finalist | History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 | René Wellek | Jonathan Cape |
| 1966 | Finalist | Science and Ethical Values | Bentley Glass | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1966 | Finalist | Starting Out in the Thirties | Alfred Kazin | Vintage Books |
| 1966 | Finalist | The Myth and the Powerhouse | Philip Rahv | Unknown |
| 1966 | Finalist | Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition | R. W. B. Lewis | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion | Norbert Wiener | MIT Press |
| 1965 | Co-winner | The Oysters of Locmariaquer | Eleanor Clark | Ecco |
| 1965 | Finalist | Because I Was Flesh | Edward Dahlberg | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | Heredity and the Nature of Man | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years | Howard Mumford Jones | Viking |
| 1965 | Finalist | Shadow and Act | Ralph Ellison | Vintage Books |
| 1965 | Finalist | The Language of Nature: An Essay on the Philosophy of Science | David Hawkins | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | The Life of the Drama | Eric Bentley | Atheneum |
| 1965 | Finalist | The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today | John Courtney Murray | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama | Robert Brustein | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | We Are Not Alone: The Search for Intelligent Life on Other Worlds | Walter S. Sullivan | Unknown |
| 1965 | Finalist | With God in Russia | Walter Ciszek | Unknown |
| 1964 | Co-winner | John Keats: The Making of a Poet | Aileen Ward | Secker & Warburg |
| 1964 | Co-winner | Man-made America: Chaos or Control? | Christopher Tunnard, Boris Pushkarev | Yale University Press |
| 1964 | Finalist | Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters | Francis Steegmuller | Unknown |
| 1964 | Finalist | Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City | Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan | Unknown |
| 1964 | Finalist | John Keats | Walter Jackson Bate | Harvard University Press |
| 1964 | Finalist | The Fire Next Time | James Baldwin | Penguin Books |
| 1964 | Finalist | The Last Horizon | Raymond Fredric Dasmann | Macmillan |
| 1964 | Finalist | The Quiet Crisis | Stewart Udall | Unknown |
| 1964 | Finalist | Wasp Farm | Howard Ensign Evans | Unknown |
| 1963 | Winner | Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 | Leon Edel | Avon Books |
| 1962 | Winner | The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects | Lewis Mumford | Unknown |
| 1961 | Winner | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | William L. Shirer | Simon & Schuster |
| 1960 | Winner | James Joyce | Richard Ellmann | Unknown |
| 1959 | Winner | Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël | J. Christopher Herold | Charter Books |
| 1958 | Winner | The Lion and the Throne | Catherine Drinker Bowen | Little, Brown |
| 1957 | Winner | Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 | George F. Kennan | Princeton University Press |
| 1956 | Winner | An American in Italy | Herbert Kubly | Unknown |
| 1955 | Winner | The Measure of Man | Joseph Wood Krutch | Bobbs-Merrill |
| 1954 | Winner | A Stillness at Appomattox | Bruce Catton | Pocket Books |
| 1953 | Winner | The Course of Empire | Bernard De Voto, | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1952 | Winner | The Sea Around Us | Rachel Carson | Oxford University Press |
| 1951 | Winner | Herman Melville | Newton Arvin | Greenwood Press |
| 1950 | Winner | The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson | Ralph L. Rusk | Scribner |
| 1950 | Finalist | Killers of the Dream | Lillian Smith | Unknown |
| 1950 | Finalist | Lincoln Finds a General | Kenneth P. Williams | Macmillan |
| 1950 | Finalist | The Mature Mind | Harry Allen Overstreet | W. W. Norton |
| 1950 | Finalist | The Universe and Dr. Einstein | Lincoln Barnett | Unknown |
| 1950 | Finalist | This I Remember | Eleanor Roosevelt | Unknown |
| 1940 | Winner | As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S. | Hans Zinsser | Unknown |
| 1939 | Winner | Wind, Sand and Stars | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Reynal & Hitchcock |
| 1939 | Finalist | Days of Our Years | Pierre van Paassen | Unknown |
| 1938 | Winner | Listen! The Wind | Anne Morrow Lindbergh | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| 1937 | Winner | Madame Curie | Ève Curie | Unknown |
| 1937 | Finalist | The Importance of Living | Lin Yutang | Unknown |
| 1936 | Winner | The Flowering of New England: 1815–1865 | Van Wyck Brooks | Unknown |
| 1935 | Winner | North to the Orient | Anne Morrow Lindbergh | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| 1935 | Finalist | Personal History | Vincent Sheean | Unknown |