National Book Award for Nonfiction

(3)

Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet ^{[bio John Keats]}

Finalists are known collectively.^[55]

William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

Finalists are known collectively.^[55]

Christopher Tunnard and ,

Finalists are known collectively.^[55]

David E. Lilienthal, Change, Hope and the Bomb
Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner

Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats ^{[bio John Keats]}
Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters ^{[bio Guillaume Apollinaire]}

Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. II, Fredericksburg to Meridian (2nd of 3 vols)
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective
, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure ^{[bio S. S. McClure]}
Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera ^{[bio Diego Rivera]}

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
, The Last Horizon ^{[about conservation biology]}
Howard Ensign Evans, Wasp Farm ^{[about entomology]}
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City
Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis ^{[about conservation of natural resources]}

(3)

Eleanor Clark,
Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama
Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama
Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh ^{[autobiography]}
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture, the Formative Years

Louis Fischer, ^{[bio Vladimir Lenin]}
Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family
R. R. Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800
Willie Lee Nichols Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment ^{[about Port Royal Experiment]}
Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (third of 3 vols.) ^{[bio Henry Adams]}
Richard J. Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy ^{[bio Joseph P. Kennedy]}

Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
Walter Ciszek, With God in Russia ^[memoir]
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man
David Hawkins, The Language of Nature: An Essay on the Philosophy of Science
John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today
Walter S. Sullivan, We Are Not Alone: The Search for Intelligent Life on Other Worlds

(3)

Janet Flanner
Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties
R. W. B. Lewis, Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition
Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse
Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning ^{[about United States Bill of Rights]}
Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835–1915: Patrician at Bay ^{[bio Charles Francis Adams, Jr.]}
Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence
Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam, 1946–1966
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1964 (second of 4 vols)

No award given.

Charles Frankel, "The Love of Anxiety" and Other Essays
Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America
Bentley Glass, Science and Ethical Values
Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945–47

(3)

Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography ^{[bio Mark Twain]}
Oliver Larkin, Daumier: Man of His Time ^{[bio Honoré Daumier]}
, James Boswell: The Earlier Years ^{[bio James Boswell]}
Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father's Court ^[autobio]
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years ^{[bio Robert Frost]}

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism
James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell ^{[bio James Russell Lowell]}
Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
Peter Štanský and William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier: Two roads to the Spanish Civil War

Oscar Lewis, ^{[about culture of poverty]}
, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology ^{[five vols including Marcello Malpighi's works]}
George Beadle and , The Language of Life: An Introduction to the Science of Genetics
Wassily W. Leontief, Essays in Economics ^{[1st of two vols]}
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
Erwin Straus, Phenomenological Psychology: The Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus

(3)

William Troy, Selected Essays
R. P. Blackmur, A Primer of Ignorance
Frank Conroy, Stop-Time ^[memoir]
Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas
M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets
Stanley Weintraub, Beardsley: A Biography ^{[bio Aubrey Beardsley]}

George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (first of 2 vols.)
Henry Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years ^{[bio Woodrow Wilson]}
Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History
Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy ^{[about John F. Kennedy]}
Nathan Silver, Lost New York

Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age
Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
Suzanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1st of three vols)
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (1st of two vols)

(3)

Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography ^{[bio George Eliot]}
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds

Winthrop Jordan,
Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer ^{[about Ernest Lawrence & J. Robert Oppenheimer]}
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of America
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republic and Democratic Conventions of 1968
David M. Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict

Robert Jay Lifton,
René Dubos, So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events
Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton ^{[bio Isaac Newton]}
Karl Menninger, M.D., The Crime of Punishment
James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

(3)

Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
Richard Howard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950
Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America
, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane ^{[bio Hart Crane]}
Gore Vidal, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

T. Harry Williams, Huey Long ^{[bio Huey Long]}
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department ^[memoir]
Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention ^[memoir]
John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution ^{[bio Emiliano Zapata]}
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic

Erik Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
Kenneth E. Boulding, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics
Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe
Rollo May, Love and Will
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

(3)

Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography ^{[bio Cocteau]}
Harold Bloom, Yeats ^{[bio W. B. Yeats]}
Robert Coles, Erik H. Erikson: the Growth of His Work ^{[bio Erik Erikson]}
Nancy Milford, Zelda ^{[bio Zelda Fitzgerald]}
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (2nd of two vols)
Kenneth Rexroth, The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World

James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom ^{[bio Franklin D. Roosevelt]}
David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (second of 2 vols.) ^{[bio Charles Sumner]}
Andy Logan, Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair
Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 (fourth of 6 vols) ^{[bio Thomas Jefferson]}
C. L. Sulzberger, The Last of the Giants

,
Gustav Eckstein, The Body Has a Head
, Technological Man
, Design with Nature
Theodor Rosebury, Life on Man

(6)

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
James Dickey, Sorties
, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes
, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel ^{[bio Samuel Taylor Coleridge]}
César Graña, Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature
B. H. Haggin, Ballet Chronicle
Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance
Iris Origo, Images and Shadows ^[autobio]
John Simon, Movies into Films: Film Criticism, 1967–1970

Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers ^{[bio Eleanor Roosevelt]}
John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson ^{[bio Emily Dickinson]}
Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth: Behind A Laughing Mask ^{[bio Charles Demuth]}
David Freeman Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly ^{[bio Benjamin Rush]}
Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography ^{[bio James Madison]}
Harding Lemay, Inside, Looking Out: A Personal Memoir
D'Arcy McNickle, Indian Man: A Life of Oliver La Farge ^{[bio Oliver La Farge]}
Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (second of 3 vols) ^{[bio William Hogarth]}
Lacey Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty ^{[bio Henry VIII]}
Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

Stewart Brand, editor, The Last Whole Earth Catalogue

No other finalists announced.

Allan Nevins, The Organized War, 1863–1864 and The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865 (Ordeal of the Union, vols. 7 & 8 of eight)

No other finalists announced.

Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America

No other finalists announced.

, The Blue Whale

No other finalists announced.

(6)

Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (about Denis Diderot)
Leo Braudy, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films (about Jean Renoir)
Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (about Astaire and Rogers musicals)
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature
, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama
Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (about Edgar Allan Poe)
Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place
Linda Nochlin, Realism
Harold Rosenberg, The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity
Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950
, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art

James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 (last of 4 vols.)
Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone: Writings on Love, Hate, and Sex
Hortense Calisher, Herself (autobiography)
Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 (first of 5 vols.)
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 (Vol. V of five)
Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography
Nikki Giovanni, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being A Black Poet
John Houseman, Run-Through (memoir, first of 3)
Diane Johnson, Lesser Lives (about Mary Ellen Meredith)
George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963 (second of 2 vols.)
Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (about Eleanor Roosevelt)
Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years
Peter Štanský and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell (first volume on George Orwell)

Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (about the U.S. Vietnam War)
Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa and , The Almanac of American Politics (first biennial edition)
Herbert Block, Herblock's State of the Union (collected cartoons)
, Crisis in Watertown: The Polarization of an American Community (about Watertown, Wisconsin 1967–1969)
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (about U.S. Vietnam War origins)
Seymour Hersh, Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (about the My Lai Massacre cover-up)
Stanley Karnow, Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (about Mao Zedong and China)
Richard Sennett and , The Hidden Injuries of Class (a study of working-class consciousness)
Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People (about the Ik people)
Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion
— Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica (about the Attica Prison riot)

Split award.
, The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (see Charles Colcock Jones)
Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation
James David Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House
John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America
, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713
Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union
David Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (see Dominion of New England)
Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project, 1935–43
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944
Edward E. Rice, Mao's Way

S. E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People
Silvano Arieti, M.D., The Will to be Human
Germaine Brée, Camus and Sartre (about Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre)
Arthur Danto, Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (about Walden)
William A. Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley
William Leiss, The Domination of Nature
Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends
Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America
Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus

George B. Schaller, The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations
, and , Aquaculture: the farming and husbandry of freshwater and marine organisms (about aquaculture)
Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann (about history of computing, history of computing hardware)
Garrett Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle (see lifeboat ethics, bioethics)
Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times
Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born (about East Africa)
, Wallace and Natural Selection (about Alfred Russel Wallace)
Victor Richards, M.D., Cancer: The Wayward Cell; its origins, nature, and treatment
Ann Zwinger and Beatrice Willard, Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra (about alpine tundra)

(6)

Pauline Kael, Deeper Into Movies
Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
W. H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords
 [ru], Mandelstam (bio Osip Mandelstam)
Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations
B. H. Haggin, A Decade of Music
Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (memoir)
Edward Hoagland, Walking the Dead Diamond River (about Dead Diamond River)
Lincoln Kirstein, Elie Nadelman (bio Elie Nadelman)
Leonard B. Meyer, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations
Saul Steinberg, The Inspector (drawings)
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (1st of many volumes)

Split award.
John Leonard Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian^[c]
Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography
J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times (1613–1662)
Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and The Conquest of Solitude
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938
Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Prophetic Voice, Vol. II
Myra Friedman, Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (about Janis Joplin)
William H. Harbaugh, Lawyer's Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis
Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles
Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill Volume II: Son and Artist (about Eugene O'Neill)
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher (about Catherine Beecher)
Adam Ulam, Stalin (about Joseph Stalin)

Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. (about a Black Panthers trial)
, The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience (about the Kent State shootings)
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose
Vivian Gornick, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt
Walter Karp, Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America
Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (about U.S. Vietnam veterans)
Jessica Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business
Nora Sayre, Sixties Going on Seventies (Perspectives on the Sixties) (about 1960s)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency
Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special and Other Guns (about personal firearms)

John Leonard Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian^[c]
Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Teacher, Scholar
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans^[d]
Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt (about Franklin D. Roosevelt)^[e]
Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law
Frederic C. Lane, Venice: Maritime Republic
Edward Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970
Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality

Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks
, Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
Marjorie Grene, Jean-Paul Sartre (bio Sartre)
Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (about critical theory)
Laurence Veysey, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America (about American communes)
Frederic Wakeman, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought (about Maoism)
Harry Austryn Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 1 (collection)
, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (see New England Puritans)

S. E. Luria, Life: The Unfinished Experiment
Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein (see Albert Einstein)
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality
Amitai Etzioni, Genetic Fix: The Next Technological Revolution
J. M. Jauch, Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean Dialogue
Ruth Kirk and Louis Kirk, Desert: The American Southwest
Suzanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. II (2nd of three vols)
, Autumn of the Eagle (about bald eagle)
Robert I. Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands
William T. Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception
Edwin S. Shneidman, Deaths of Man

(6)

Split award.
Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust (bio Marcel Proust)
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher^[f]
, Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham
Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele's Portraits (about Egon Schiele)
Peter Gay, Style in History
Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke
Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal
, Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater (bio Vsevolod Meyerhold)
H. W. Janson, 16 Studies (essays in Art History)
, Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero (bio Franz Liszt)
Oliver Strunk, Essays on Music in the Western World

Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson
Richard Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography
Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years; The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company
Francis Steegmuller, "Your Isadora": The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig
Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto
Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans, Bix: Man and Legend (about Bix Beiderbecke)
Glenn Watkins, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (about Carlo Gesualdo)
James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D'Aquino: his life, thought, and work

Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (see Ned Cobb)
Raoul Berger, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (about U.S. executive privilege)
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men
, M.D., The Chasm: The Life and Death of a Great Experiment in Ghetto Education
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (bio Robert Moses)
Joe Eszterhas, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse (about the Harrisonville shooting)
with others, The Black Book ("printed scrapbook" of American "Negro historical materials"; uncredited editor Toni Morrison)
, The Working Class Majority
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics
, Muscle and Blood
Studs Terkel, Working

Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1750–Present
Erich S. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France
Gerald H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain
Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968
Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise
Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Ian Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms
, Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion (about Afro-American religion)
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity
and , Religious America (photos and text)
Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution (case studies)
Barbara Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians (about Huichol use of peyote)
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom 600–1700 (about Eastern Christianity)
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (about anti-Semitism)

Split award.
Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher^[f]
Lewis Feuer, Einstein and the Generation of Science
Howard E. Gruber and , Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity
J. L. Heilbron, H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887–1915 (bio Henry Moseley)
, The Voyages of Apollo: The Exploration of the Moon (about Apollo program)
John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
Walter S. Sullivan, Continents in Motion: The New Earth Debate (about Plate tectonics)
, Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins (about Geomythology)

(3)

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
Lincoln Kirstein, Njinsky Dancing (about Vaslav Nijinsky)
Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination
Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (about Romantic painting)
Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination
Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo's Last Paintings (about Michelangelo)

Michael J. Arlen,
Richard Barnet and , Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (about multinational corporations)
Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change
John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (about Money)
W. Eugene Smith and , Minamata (exposé of Minamata disease)
, A Time to Die

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe (about Jean Baptiste Lamy)
R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (about Edith Wharton)
Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime
Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America
Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies

(3)

W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume VI 1955–1966
B. L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement
E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky: A Writer in His Time (about Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building Lately?
Rufus E. Miles, Jr., Awakening from the American Dream

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made
Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality
Joshua C. Taylor, America as Art

(3)

W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (about Samuel Johnson)
James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet
Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly (autobiographical)
Will Durant and Ariel Durant, A Dual Autobiography
Frank Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing

Gloria Emerson,
Kai T. Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (about the Buffalo Creek Flood)
Michael Harrington, The Vast Majority
, Pink Collar Workers (about pink-collar workers)
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914
Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment
Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–48
Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (Natural history in the New World)
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron (Bleichröder and Bismarck)

(3)

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times
Donald Hall, Remembering Poets (biographical memoir)
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur
William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats
Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (see Peace science)
Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of the Western Wind (memoir)
Alfred Kazin, New York Jew
Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries

, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763
Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule
Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945
John H. White, Jr., The American Railroad Passenger Car (John Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

Lauren Bacall, Lauren Bacall by Myself
Barbara Gordon, I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can (Valium addiction)
John Houseman, Front and Center (memoir, second of 3)
William Saroyan, Obituaries

Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918–1978 (1978)

No other finalists announced.

Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Millicent Bell, Marquand: An American Life
Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions
Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur

A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978)
W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (1977)
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (1978)
Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978)

Julia Child, Julia Child and More Company
Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People
Gay Gaer Luce, Your Second Life: Vitality and Growth in Middle and Later Years from the Experiences of the Sage Program
Nathan Pritikin with , The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise ("The Pritikin Diet")
Robert Ellis Smith, Privacy: How to Protect What's Left of It

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Frances Wells Burck, Babysense: A Practical and Supportive Guide to Baby Care
Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City
Tracy Hotchner, Pregnancy and Childbirth: The Complete Guide for a New Life
Calvin Trillin, Alice, Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater (1978)

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Frances FitzGerald, America Revised
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be
Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888–1889
Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (1978)
Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978)
Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (1978)

, editor, Congressional Quarterly's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court
, and , eds., Encyclopedia of China Today
, Arts in America: A Bibliography
J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions, Vols. I & II
and , eds., Index to Children's Songs

Tim Brooks and , The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946–Present (new)
, M.D., and , The Ms. Guide to a Woman's Health (new)
Editors of , The Solar Age Resource Book (new)
Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases (1976)
, editor, Kids: Day In and Day Out: a parents' manual (new)

Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years (memoir, first of 3)
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945
George F. Kennan, Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890
Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace

Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978)
James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (1978)
Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1978)
Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case (1978)
Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (1978)

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (about Gnostic Gospels)
Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation
Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (canonical criticism)
Peter Kreeft, Love Is Stronger Than Death
Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (about Biblical authority)

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (1977)
Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (mystical novel) (1977)
Catherine Marshall, The Helper (about the Holy Ghost) (1978)

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
Douglas Faulkner and Richard Chesher, Living Corals
Bernd Heinrich, Bumblebee Economics
Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (new)
William J. Kaufmann, Black Holes and Warped Spacetime (new)
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)
Anne W. Simon, The Thin Edge: Coast and Man in Crisis (1978)

Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life
Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World
James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times
Peter Štanský and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century

Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978)
E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (1953)
Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (1979)
Maureen Howard, Facts of Life (autobiography) (1978)
Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson (1979)

Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men^[h]
Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (autobiography)
John Graves, From a Limestone Ledge (Texas Monthly essays)
Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (see Hollywood blacklist)
Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found

Jane Kramer, The Last Cowboy: Europeans and The Politics of Memory (1977)
Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (about news media) (1979)
Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World's Food Supply (1979)
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (travel memoir) (1979)

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality
James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna:Politics and Culture
Page Smith, The Shaping of America: A People's History of the Young Republic

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979)
Richard Drinnon, The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980)
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period (1978)
Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (1979)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (new)

Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections on Natural History
Claude C. Albritton, The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth's Antiquity after the Sixteenth Century
René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth
Timothy Ferris, Galaxies
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)
Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979)
Joseph Silk, The Big Bang: The Creation and Evolution of the Universe (new)
Walter Sullivan, Black Holes: the Edge of the Space, the End of Time (1979)

David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (about Theodore Roosevelt)
Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography
Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (last of 6 vols.)
William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (about Ulysses S. Grant)
Milton Rugoff, The Beechers

Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980)
Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1980)
Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980)
Ted Morgan, Maugham (about W. Somerset Maugham) (1980)
Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (1979)

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine
Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
James Fallows, National Defense
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
Andrea Lee, Russian Journal

Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (1980) (see Hollywood blacklist)
Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing (1979)
Edward Hoagland, African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (1979)
Landon Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980)
Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (1980)

, People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879
Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline
Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East (see Suez Crisis)
Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945
C. Vann Woodward, editor, Mary Chestnut's Civil War (diary revised by Chestnut)

, The Generation of 1914 (see Lost Generation) (1979)
Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980)
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (1980)
Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (1980)
Charles Rembar, The Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System (1980)

Donald C. Johanson and , Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind
Gene Bylinsky, Life in Darwin's Universe: Evolution and the Cosmos
Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Dawn: The Origins of Matter and Life
Steven J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes and the Origin of Species

Fred Alan Wolf, Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists (new)
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979)
Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (1974)
Bernd Heinrich, Bumblebee Economics (1979)
Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration in Science & Philosophy (1979)

Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller
Russell Baker, Growing Up (first of two)
Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnso]: The Path to Power (first of 3 vols.)
Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953
Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years

James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (1980)
Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (last of 6 vols.) (1981)
Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981)
William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (about Ulysses S. Grant) (1981)
Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (1980)

Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age
David McClintock, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (about the Begelman affair)
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth
Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

James Fallows, National Defense (1981)
Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (1981)
Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980)
Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1981)
Joanna Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (new)

Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression
Gordon A. Craig, The Germans
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (see Salem witch trials)
William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South

Frank E. Manuel and , Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979)
George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981)
Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (1981)
John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (about cartography) (1981)

Abraham Pais, "Subtle is the Lord ...": The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
Philip J. Hilts, Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science (bio Robert R. Wilson, Mark Ptashne, John McCarthy)
Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance
Heinz R. Pagels, Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature

Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience (1981)
Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980)
Cynthia Moss, Portrait in the Wild: Animal Behavior in the Western World (1979)
Berton Roueché, The Medical Detectives (1980)
G. Ledyard Stebbins, Darwin to DNA: Molecules to Humanity (new)