Year
|
Author
|
Title
|
Result
|
Ref.
|
1975
|
Paul Fussell
|
The Great War and Modern Memory
|
Winner
|
|
1976
|
Bruno Bettelheim
|
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
|
Winner
|
|
1977
|
Susan Sontag
|
On Photography
|
Winner
|
|
1978
|
Meyer Schapiro
|
Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2)
|
Winner
|
|
1979
|
Elaine Pagels
|
The Gnostic Gospels
|
Winner
|
|
1980
|
Helen Vendler
|
Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
|
Winner
|
|
1981
|
Virgil Thomson
|
A Virgil Thomson Reader
|
Winner
|
|
1982
|
Gore Vidal
|
The Second American Revolution and Other Essays
|
Winner
|
|
1983
|
John Updike
|
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
|
Winner
|
|
1984
|
Robert Hass
|
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
|
Winner
|
|
1985
|
William H. Gass
|
Habitations of the Word: Essays
|
Winner
|
|
1986
|
Joseph Brodsky
|
Less Than One: Selected Essays
|
Winner
|
|
1987
|
Edwin Denby
|
Dance Writings
|
Winner
|
|
1988
|
Clifford Geertz
|
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
|
Winner
|
|
1989
|
John Clive
|
Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History
|
Winner
|
|
1990
|
Arthur C. Danto
|
Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present
|
Winner
|
|
1991
|
Lawrence L. Langer
|
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
|
Winner
|
|
1992
|
Garry Wills
|
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
|
Winner
|
|
1993
|
John Dizikes
|
Opera in America: A Cultural History
|
Winner
|
|
1994
|
Gerald Early
|
The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture
|
Winner
|
|
1995
|
Robert Darnton
|
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
|
Winner
|
|
1996
|
William H. Gass
|
Finding a Form
|
Winner
|
|
1997
|
Mario Vargas Llosa
|
Making Waves
|
Winner
|
|
1998
|
Gary Giddins
|
Visions of Jazz: The First Century
|
Winner
|
|
1999
|
Jorge Luis Borges
|
Selected Non-Fictions
|
Winner
|
|
2000
|
Cynthia Ozick
|
Quarrel & Quandary
|
Winner
|
|
2001
|
Martin Amis
|
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000
|
Winner
|
|
2002
|
William H. Gass
|
Tests of Time
|
Winner
|
|
2003
|
Rebecca Solnit
|
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
|
Winner
|
|
2004
|
Patrick Neate
|
Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet
|
Winner
|
|
2005
|
William Logan
|
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
|
Winner
|
[4]
|
Hal Crowther
|
Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South
|
Finalist
|
[5]
|
Arthur Danto
|
Unnatural Wonders
|
John Updike
|
Still Looking: Essays on American Art
|
Eliot Weinberger
|
What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles
|
2006
|
Lawrence Weschler
|
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
|
Winner
|
[6]
|
Bruce Bawer
|
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within
|
Finalist
|
|
Frederick Crews
|
Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
|
Daniel Dennett
|
Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon
|
Lia Purpura
|
On Looking: Essays
|
2007
|
Alex Ross
|
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
|
Winner
|
[7][8][9]
|
Ben Ratliff
|
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
|
Finalist
|
[8]
|
Julia Alvarez
|
Once Upon a Quniceanera
|
Susan Faludi
|
The Terror Dream
|
Joan Acocella
|
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints
|
2008
|
Seth Lerer
|
Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter
|
Winner
|
[10]
|
Richard Brody
|
Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
|
Finalist
|
[11][10]
|
Joel L. Kraemer
|
Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization's Greatest Minds
|
Reginald Shepard
|
Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
|
Vivian Gornick
|
The Men in My Life
|
2009
|
Eula Biss
|
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
|
Winner
|
[12][13][14]
|
Stephen Burt
|
Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
|
Finalist
|
[12]
|
Morris Dickstein
|
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
|
David Hajdu
|
Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
|
Greg Milner
|
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
|
2010
|
Clare Cavanagh
|
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West
|
Winner
|
[15][16]
|
Susie Linfield
|
The Cruel Radiance
|
Finalist
|
[15]
|
Elif Batuman
|
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
|
Terry Castle
|
The Professor and Other Writings
|
Ander Monson
|
Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir
|
2011
|
Geoff Dyer
|
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
|
Winner
|
[17][18]
|
David Bellos
|
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
|
Finalist
|
[19][17][18]
|
Dubravka Ugresic
|
Karaoke Culture: Essays
|
Ellen Willis
|
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
|
Jonathan Lethem
|
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
|
2012
|
Marina Warner
|
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
|
Winner
|
[20][21]
|
Mary Ruefle
|
Madness, Rack, and Honey
|
Finalist
|
[22][23][20]
|
Paul Elie
|
Reinventing Bach
|
Kevin Young
|
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
|
Daniel Mendelsohn
|
Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
|
2013
|
Franco Moretti
|
Distant Reading
|
Winner
|
[24][25]
|
Mary Beard
|
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations
|
Finalist
|
[26][24]
|
Janet Malcolm
|
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
|
Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlman
|
The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus
|
Hilton Als
|
White Girls
|
2014
|
Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz
|
The Essential Ellen Willis
|
Winner
|
[27][28]
|
Claudia Rankine
|
Citizen: An American Lyric
|
Finalist
|
[29][27]
|
Vikram Chandra
|
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
|
Eula Biss
|
On Immunity: An Inoculation
|
Lynne Tillman
|
What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
|
2015
|
Maggie Nelson
|
The Argonauts
|
Winner
|
[30]
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates
|
Between the World and Me
|
Finalist
|
[30]
|
Leo Damrosch
|
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
|
Colm Tóibín
|
On Elizabeth Bishop
|
James Wood
|
The Nearest Thing to Life
|
2016
|
Carol Anderson
|
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
|
Winner
|
[31]
|
Mark Greif
|
Against Everything: Essays
|
Finalist
|
[31]
|
Peter Orner
|
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
|
Alice Kaplan
|
Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
|
Olivia Laing
|
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
|
2017
|
Carina Chocano
|
You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages
|
Winner
|
[32][33][34]
|
Kevin Young
|
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News
|
Finalist
|
[32][35]
|
Camille Dungy
|
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
|
Valeria Luiselli
|
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
|
Edwidge Danticat
|
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
|
2018
|
Zadie Smith
|
Feel Free: Essays
|
Winner
|
[36][37][38][39]
|
Robert Christgau
|
Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
|
Finalist
|
[36]
|
Lacy M. Johnson
|
The Reckonings: Essays
|
Terrance Hayes
|
To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
|
Stephen Greenblatt
|
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
|
2019
|
Saidiya Hartman
|
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval
|
Winner
|
[40][41]
|
Maria Tumarkin
|
Axiomatic
|
Finalist
|
[40]
|
Lydia Davis
|
Essays One
|
Hanif Abdurraqib
|
Go Ahead in the Rain
|
Peter Schjeldahl
|
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
|
2020
|
Nicole R. Fleetwood
|
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
|
Winner
|
[42][43][44]
|
Wendy A. Woloson
|
Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America
|
Finalist
|
[43]
|
Cristina Rivera Garza
|
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
|
Namwali Serpell
|
Stranger Faces
|
Vivian Gornick
|
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
|
2021
|
Melissa Febos
|
Girlhood
|
Winner
|
[45]
|
Mark McGurl
|
Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
|
Finalist
|
[46][47][48]
|
Amia Srinivasan
|
The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
|
Jesse McCarthy
|
Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays
|
Jenny Diski
|
Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
|
2022
|
Timothy Bewes
|
Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age
|
Winner
|
[49]
|
Rachel Aviv
|
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
|
Finalist
|
[50]
|
Peter Brooks
|
Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
|
Margo Jefferson
|
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
|
Alia Trabucco Zerán (trans. by Sophie Hughes)
|
When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
|
2023
|
Tina Post
|
Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression
|
Winner
|
|
Grace Lavery
|
Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques
|
Finalist
|
[51]
|
Naomi Klein
|
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
|
Myriam Gurba
|
Creep: Accusations and Confessions
|
Nicholas Dames
|
The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
|