| Winner | [d] | John Leonard Clive |
| Winner | Life: The Unfinished Experiment | S. E. Luria |
| Winner | Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks | Maurice Natanson |
| Winner | The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. | Murray Kempton |
| Winner | Deeper into Movies | Pauline Kael |
| A Decade of Music | B. H. Haggin |
| Pentimento: A Book of Portraits | Lillian Hellman |
| Walking the Dead Diamond River | Edward Hoagland |
| Elie Nadelman | Lincoln Kirstein |
| Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations | Leonard B. Meyer |
| The Inspector | Saul Steinberg |
| Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 | Kevin Starr |
| Malcolm Lowry: A Biography | Douglas Day |
| Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times | J. H. Adamson |
| Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and The Conquest of Solitude | Robert V. Bruce |
| Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 | Stephen F. Cohen |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Prophetic Voice, Vol. II | Lester G. Crocker |
| Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin | Myra Friedman |
| Lawyer's Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis | William H. Harbaugh |
| The Devil and John Foster Dulles | Townsend Hoopes |
| O'Neill Volume II: Son and Artist | Louis Sheaffer |
| Catherine Beecher | Kathryn Kish Sklar |
| Stalin | Adam Ulam |
| Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Teacher, Scholar | Ray Allen Billington |
| [e] | Daniel J. Boorstin |
| [f] | Frank Freidel |
| A History of American Law | Lawrence M. Friedman |
| Venice: Maritime Republic | Frederic C. Lane |
| Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War | Edward Pessen |
| Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 | Richard Slotkin |
| The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 | Stephan Thernstrom |
| Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality | Robert C. Tucker |
| Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives | Don Browning |
| The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion | Harvey Cox |
| The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness | Erich Fromm |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Marjorie Grene |
| The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory | Trent Schroyer |
| The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America | Laurence Veysey |
| History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought | Frederic Wakeman |
| Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 1 | Harry Austryn Wolfson |
| Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World | Larzer Ziff |
| Einstein | Jeremy Bernstein |
| Genetic Diversity and Human Equality | Theodosius Dobzhansky |
| Genetic Fix: The Next Technological Revolution | Amitai Etzioni |
| Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean Dialogue | J. M. Jauch |
| Desert: The American Southwest | Ruth Kirk and Louis Kirk |
| Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. II | Suzanne K. Langer |
| Autumn of the Eagle | George Laycock |
| Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands | Robert I. Levy |
| Behavior: The Control of Perception | William T. Powers |
| Deaths of Man | Edwin S. Shneidman |
| The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience | Peter Davies |
| Economics and the Public Purpose | John Kenneth Galbraith |
| In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt | Vivian Gornick |
| Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America | Walter Karp |
| Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners | Robert Jay Lifton |
| Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business | Jessica Mitford |
| Sixties Going on Seventies | Nora Sayre |
| The Imperial Presidency | Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. |
| The Saturday Night Special and Other Guns | Robert Sherrill |
| The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War | Daniel Aaron |
| Forewords and Afterwords | W. H. Auden |
| Mandelstam | Clarence Brown |
| Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations | Richard Ellmann |