| Title | Author | Shortlisted |
|---|
| The Optimist's Daughter | Eudora Welty | |
| The Siege of Krishnapur | J. G. Farrell | |
| The Chip-Chip Gatherers | Shiva Naipaul | |
| The Gods Themselves | Isaac Asimov | |
| Clube de Campo | Rubens Teixeira Scavone | |
| Chimera | John Barth | |
| Diderot | Arthur M. Wilson | |
| George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 | James Thomas Flexner | |
| 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 | |
| A Religious History of the American People | S. E. Ahlstrom | |
| The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations | George B. Schaller | |
| The Dressmaker | Beryl Bainbridge | |
| A Green Equinox | Elizabeth Mavor | |
| The Black Prince | Iris Murdoch | |
| When HARLIE Was One | David Gerrold | |
| There Will Be Time | Poul Anderson | |
| The Book of Skulls | Robert Silverberg | |
| Dying Inside | Robert Silverberg | |
| A Choice of Gods | Clifford D. Simak | |
| The Late Great Creature | Brock Brower | |
| Hermaphrodeity | Alan H. Friedman | |
| Geronimo Rex | Barry Hannah | |
| The Friends of Eddie Coyle | George V. Higgins | |
| The Prince | R. M. Koster | |
| Transparent Things | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| Mumbo Jumbo | Ishmael Reed | |
| The Confessions of a Child of the Century | Thomas Rogers | |
| Enemies, A Love Story | Isaac Bashevis Singer | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |