| Winner | Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation | Isaiah Trunk |
| Winner | The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations | George B. Schaller |
| Winner | George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 | James Thomas Flexner |
| Winner | The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War | Robert Manson Myers |
| Winner | A Religious History of the American People | S. E. Ahlstrom |
| Winner | Diderot | Arthur M. Wilson |
| South to a Very Old Place | Albert Murray |
| Realism | Linda Nochlin |
| The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks | Harold Rosenberg |
| Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art | Leo Steinberg |
| Sincerity and Authenticity | Lionel Trilling |
| American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 | Alec Wilder |
| On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art | Vernon Young |
| Combat in the Erogenous Zone: Writings on Love, Hate, and Sex | Ingrid Bengis |
| Herself | Hortense Calisher |
| FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 | Kenneth S. Davis |
| Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 | Leon Edel |
| Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography | Eleanor Flexner |
| Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being A Black Poet | Nikki Giovanni |
| Run-Through | John Houseman |
| Lesser Lives | Diane Johnson |
| Memoirs, 1950–1963 | George F. Kennan |
| Eleanor: The Years Alone | Joseph P. Lash |
| Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years | Margaret Mead |
| The Unknown Orwell | Peter Štanský |
| The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House | James David Barber |
| Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America | John Diggins |
| Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 | Richard Dunn |
| Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union | Loren Graham |
| The Glorious Revolution in America | David Lovejoy |
| The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project, 1935–43 | Jerre Mangione |
| Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 | Robert O. Paxton |
| Mao's Way | Edward E. Rice |
| The Will to be Human | Silvano Arieti |
| Camus and Sartre | Germaine Brée |
| Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy | Arthur Danto |
| The Senses of Walden | Stanley Cavell |
| Person and God in a Spanish Valley | William A. Christian |
| The Domination of Nature | William Leiss |
| Where the Wasteland Ends | Theodore Roszak |
| Science and Sentiment in America | Morton White |
| Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus | Theodore Ziolkowski |
| Aquaculture: the farming and husbandry of freshwater and marine organisms | John E. Bardach |
| The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann | Herman H. Goldstine |
| Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle | Garrett Hardin |
| Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times | Morris Kline |
| The Tree Where Man Was Born | Peter Matthiessen |
| Wallace and Natural Selection | H. Lewis McKinney |
| Cancer: The Wayward Cell; its origins, nature, and treatment | Victor Richards, M.D. |
| Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra | Ann Zwinger |
| Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Frances FitzGerald |
| The Almanac of American Politics | Michael Barone |
| Herblock's State of the Union | Herbert Block |
| Crisis in Watertown: The Polarization of an American Community | Lynn Eden |
| The Best and the Brightest | David Halberstam |
| Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 | Seymour Hersh |
| Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution | Stanley Karnow |
| The Hidden Injuries of Class | Richard Sennett |
| The Mountain People | Colin M. Turnbull |
| Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion | Garry Wills |
| Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica | Garry Wills |
| Jean Renoir: The World of His Films | Leo Braudy |
| The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book | Arlene Croce |
| Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature | Stanley Fish |
| Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama | Michael Goldman |
| Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe | Daniel Hoffman |