| Title | Author | Shortlisted |
|---|
| The Flowering of New England: 1815–1865 | Van Wyck Brooks | |
| Madame Curie | Ève Curie | |
| With Malice Toward Some | Margaret Halsey | |
| Listen! The Wind | Anne Morrow Lindbergh | |
| As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S. | Hans Zinsser | |
| The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War | Robert Manson Myers | |
| Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation | Isaiah Trunk | |
| [d] | John Leonard Clive | |
| World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made | Irving Howe | |
| The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914 | David McCullough | |
| Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763 | Richard Beale Davis | |
| And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918–1978 | Malcolm Cowley | |
| The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt | Edmund Morris | |
| Max Perkins: Editor of Genius | A. Scott Berg | |
| Samuel Beckett: A Biography | Deirdre Bair | |
| Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Ronald Steel | |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times | James R. Mellow | |
| The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations | Christopher Lasch | |
| The Snow Leopard | Peter Matthiessen | |
| The Last Cowboy: Europeans and The Politics of Memory | Jane Kramer | |
| Naming Names | Victor S. Navasky | |
| National Defense | James Fallows | |
| The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946–present | Tim Brooks | |
| A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery | Leon F. Litwack | |
| The Generation of 1914 | Robert Wohl | |
| Utopian Thought in the Western World | Frank E. Manuel | |
| A Severe Mercy | Sheldon Vanauken | |
| [b] | Lin Yutang | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |
| Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America | Lawrence Goodwyn | |
| Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America | Linda Gordon | |
| Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality | Richard Kluger | |
| America as Art | Joshua C. Taylor | |
| The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized | Henry Steele Commager | |
| Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–48 | Robert J. Donovan | |
| A Species of Eternity | Joseph Kastner | |
| Gold and Iron | Fritz Stern | |
| Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule | Reinhard Bendix | |
| Germany, 1866–1945 | Gordon A. Craig | |
| The American Railroad Passenger Car | John H. White, Jr. | |
| Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence | Garry Wills | |
| Marquand: An American Life | Millicent Bell | |
| Bloomsbury: A House of Lions | Leon Edel | |
| Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur | Ernest Samuels | |
| Samuel Johnson | W. Jackson Bate | |
| American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur | William Manchester | |
| Robert Kennedy and His Times | Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | |
| Willa Cather: A Critical Biography | E. K. Brown | |
| Facts of Life | Maureen Howard | |
| Being Bernard Berenson | Meryle Secrest | |
| Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy | Joseph P. Lash | |
| Peter the Great: His Life and World | Robert K. Massie | |
| Maugham | Ted Morgan | |
| Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello | Dumas Malone | |
| William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked | Paul Mariani | |
| Grant: A Biography | William S. McFeely | |
| Alice James: A Biography | Jean Strouse | |
| Babysense: A Practical and Supportive Guide to Baby Care | Frances Wells Burck | |
| The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City | Farallones Institute | |
| Pregnancy and Childbirth: The Complete Guide for a New Life | Tracy Hotchner | |
| Alice, Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater | Calvin Trillin | |
| Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life | Sissela Bok | |
| Of Wolves and Men | Barry Lopez | |
| The White Album | Joan Didion | |
| The Powers That Be | David Halberstam | |
| 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 | |
| Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing | Norman Cousins | |
| African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan | Edward Hoagland | |
| Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation | Landon Jones | |
| Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 | Barbara Novak | |
| Joe McCarthy and the Press | Edwin R. Bayley | |
| Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars | Paul Fussell | |
| Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War | Al Santoli | |
| Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier | Joanna Stratton | |
| The Ms. Guide to a Woman's Health | Cynthia W. Cooke, M.D., and Susan Dworkin | |
| The Solar Age Resource Book | Solar Age magazine editors | |
| I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases | Stuart Berg Flexner | |
| Kids: Day In and Day Out: a parents' manual | Elisabeth L. Scharlatt | |
| The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History | James Lincoln Collier | |
| The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America | Daniel J. Kevles | |
| Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case | Allen Weinstein | |
| In Search of History: A Personal Adventure | Theodore H. White | |
| The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building | Richard Drinnon | |
| In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period | A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. | |
| Munich: The Price of Peace | Telford Taylor | |
| A People's History of the United States | Howard Zinn | |
| The Dream of the Golden Mountains | Malcolm Cowley | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 | Robert Dallek | |
| At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present | Carl N. Degler | |
| The Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System | Charles Rembar | |
| White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History | George M. Fredrickson | |
| 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline | Ray Huang | |
| The Mapmakers | John Noble Wilford | |
| Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah | Richard Bach | |
| The Helper | Catherine Marshall | |