National Book Award for Nonfiction 1981

Nominations

Winner	Walt Whitman: A Life	Justin Kaplan
Winner	The Last Cowboy: Europeans and The Politics of Memory	Jane Kramer
Winner	Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery	Leon F. Litwack
Winner	Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality	John Boswell
Winner	Samuel Beckett: A Biography	Deirdre Bair
Winner	China Men	Maxine Hong Kingston
	Being Bernard Berenson	Meryle Secrest
	The Powers That Be	David Halberstam
	The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s	Malcolm Cowley
	From a Limestone Ledge	John Graves
	Naming Names	Victor S. Navasky
	American Dreams: Lost and Found	Studs Terkel
	The White Album	Joan Didion
	Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World's Food Supply	Dan Morgan
	The Old Patagonian Express	Paul Theroux
	Munich: The Price of Peace	Telford Taylor
	Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith	James H. Billington
	The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe	Steven Ozment
	Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture	Carl E. Schorske
	The Shaping of America: A People's History of the Young Republic	Page Smith
	The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building	Richard Drinnon
	In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period	A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.
	Bloomsbury: A House of Lions	Leon Edel
	A People's History of the United States	Howard Zinn
	Peter the Great: His Life and World	Robert K. Massie
	Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times	James R. Mellow
	Orwell: The Transformation	Peter Štanský
	Willa Cather: A Critical Biography	E. K. Brown
	Facts of Life	Maureen Howard