| Title | Author | Shortlisted |
|---|
| The Conservationist | Nadine Gordimer | |
| The Sacred and Profane Love Machine | Iris Murdoch | |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| As Meninas | Lygia Fagundes Teles | |
| Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | |
| Deeper into Movies | Pauline Kael | |
| [d] | John Leonard Clive | |
| Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks | Maurice Natanson | |
| Life: The Unfinished Experiment | S. E. Luria | |
| The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. | Murray Kempton | |
| Holiday | Stanley Middleton | |
| Ending Up | Kingsley Amis | |
| The Bottle Factory Outing | Beryl Bainbridge | |
| In Their Wisdom | C. P. Snow | |
| Time Enough for Love | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| Protector | Larry Niven | |
| The People of the Wind | Poul Anderson | |
| The Man Who Folded Himself | David Gerrold | |
| Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories | Doris Betts | |
| The World of Apples | John Cheever | |
| Apostles of Light | Ellen Douglas | |
| Searches and Seizures | Stanley Elkin | |
| Nickel Mountain | John Gardner | |
| Black Conceit | John Leonard | |
| Ninety-Two in the Shade | Thomas McGuane | |
| People Will Always Be Kind | Wilfrid Sheed | |
| Burr | Gore Vidal | |
| State of Grace | Joy Williams | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |