| Winner | Marcel Proust | Roger Shattuck |
| Winner | Anarchy, State, and Utopia | Robert Nozick |
| Winner | All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw | Theodore Rosengarten |
| Winner | The Life of Emily Dickinson | Richard B. Sewall |
| Winner | The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson | Bernard Bailyn |
| Winner | The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher | Lewis Thomas |
| Winner | Interpretation of Schizophrenia | Silvano Arieti |
| 16 Studies | H. W. Janson |
| Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero | Eleanor Perényi |
| Essays on Music in the Western World | Oliver Strunk |
| Patrick Henry: A Biography | Richard Beeman |
| Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys | Michael Collins |
| Edward Weston: Fifty Years; The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work | Ben Maddow |
| Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company | James R. Mellow |
| "Your Isadora": The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig | Francis Steegmuller |
| The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto | Wallace Stegner |
| Bix: Man and Legend | Richard M. Sudhalter |
| Gesualdo: The Man and His Music | Glenn Watkins |
| Friar Thomas D'Aquino: his life, thought, and work | James A. Weisheipl |
| Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft | Paul Boyer |
| Rome Before Avignon | Robert Brentano |
| Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made | Eugene D. Genovese |
| Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1750–Present | John R. Gillis |
| The Last Generation of the Roman Republic | Erich S. Gruen |
| Utopian Communism in France | Christopher H. Johnson |
| The Revolutionary Left in Spain | Gerald H. Meaker |
| Strikes in France, 1830–1968 | Edward Shorter |
| The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise | Mira Wilkins |
| Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion | Peter H. Wood |
| Myths, Models and Paradigms | Ian Barbour |
| Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion | Leonard E. Barrett |
| The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity | John Murray Cuddihy |
| Religious America | Philip Garvin |
| Religion and Revolution | Guenter Lewy |
| Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians | Barbara Myerhoff |
| The Spirit of Eastern Christendom 600–1700 | Jaroslav Pelikan |
| Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism | Rosemary Radford Ruether |
| Einstein and the Generation of Science | Lewis Feuer |
| Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity | Howard E. Gruber |
| H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887–1915 | J. L. Heilbron |
| The Voyages of Apollo: The Exploration of the Moon | Richard S. Lewis |
| The Curve of Binding Energy | John McPhee |
| Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View | Stanley Milgram |
| Continents in Motion: The New Earth Debate | Walter S. Sullivan |
| Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins | Dorothy B. Vitaliano |
| Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth | Raoul Berger |
| All the President's Men | Carl Bernstein |
| The Chasm: The Life and Death of a Great Experiment in Ghetto Education | Robert Jean Campbell |
| The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York | Robert Caro |
| Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse | Joe Eszterhas |
| The Black Book | Middleton A. Harris |
| The Working Class Majority | Andrew Levinson |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values | Robert M. Pirsig |
| The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics | Franz Schurmann |
| Muscle and Blood | Rachel Scott |
| The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. II, Fredericksburg to Meridian | Shelby Foote |
| Working | Studs Terkel |
| Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham | Calvin Bedient |
| Egon Schiele's Portraits | Alessandra Comini |
| Style in History | Peter Gay |
| The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke | Richard Gilman |
| Seduction and Betrayal | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater | Marjorie L. Hoover |