| Title | Author | Shortlisted |
|---|
| Docherty | William McIlvanney | |
| The Dispossessed | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| Marcel Proust | Roger Shattuck | |
| The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher | Lewis Thomas | |
| The Life of Emily Dickinson | Richard B. Sewall | |
| The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson | Bernard Bailyn | |
| Anarchy, State, and Utopia | Robert Nozick | |
| Interpretation of Schizophrenia | Silvano Arieti | |
| All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw | Theodore Rosengarten | |
| As Velhas | Adonias Filho | |
| Heat and Dust | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala | |
| Fire Time | Poul Anderson | |
| Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said | Philip K. Dick | |
| The Mote in God's Eye | Larry Niven | |
| Inverted World | Christopher Priest | |
| Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham | Calvin Bedient | |
| Egon Schiele's Portraits | Alessandra Comini | |
| Style in History | Peter Gay | |
| The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke | Richard Gilman | |
| Seduction and Betrayal | Elizabeth Hardwick | |
| Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater | Marjorie L. Hoover | |
| 16 Studies | H. W. Janson | |
| Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero | Eleanor Perényi | |
| Essays on Music in the Western World | Oliver Strunk | |
| Patrick Henry: A Biography | Richard Beeman | |
| Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys | Michael Collins | |
| Edward Weston: Fifty Years; The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work | Ben Maddow | |
| Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company | James R. Mellow | |
| "Your Isadora": The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig | Francis Steegmuller | |
| The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto | Wallace Stegner | |
| Bix: Man and Legend | Richard M. Sudhalter | |
| Gesualdo: The Man and His Music | Glenn Watkins | |
| Friar Thomas D'Aquino: his life, thought, and work | James A. Weisheipl | |
| Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft | Paul Boyer | |
| Rome Before Avignon | Robert Brentano | |
| The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. II, Fredericksburg to Meridian | Shelby Foote | |
| Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made | Eugene D. Genovese | |
| Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1750–Present | John R. Gillis | |
| The Last Generation of the Roman Republic | Erich S. Gruen | |
| Utopian Communism in France | Christopher H. Johnson | |
| The Revolutionary Left in Spain | Gerald H. Meaker | |
| Strikes in France, 1830–1968 | Edward Shorter | |
| The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise | Mira Wilkins | |
| Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion | Peter H. Wood | |
| Myths, Models and Paradigms | Ian Barbour | |
| Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion | Leonard E. Barrett | |
| The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity | John Murray Cuddihy | |
| Religious America | Philip Garvin | |
| Religion and Revolution | Guenter Lewy | |
| Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians | Barbara Myerhoff | |
| The Spirit of Eastern Christendom 600–1700 | Jaroslav Pelikan | |
| Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism | Rosemary Radford Ruether | |
| Einstein and the Generation of Science | Lewis Feuer | |
| Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity | Howard E. Gruber | |
| H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887–1915 | J. L. Heilbron | |
| The Voyages of Apollo: The Exploration of the Moon | Richard S. Lewis | |
| The Curve of Binding Energy | John McPhee | |
| Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View | Stanley Milgram | |
| Continents in Motion: The New Earth Debate | Walter S. Sullivan | |
| Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins | Dorothy B. Vitaliano | |
| Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth | Raoul Berger | |
| All the President's Men | Carl Bernstein | |
| The Chasm: The Life and Death of a Great Experiment in Ghetto Education | Robert Jean Campbell | |
| The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York | Robert Caro | |
| Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse | Joe Eszterhas | |
| The Black Book | Middleton A. Harris | |
| The Working Class Majority | Andrew Levinson | |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics | Franz Schurmann | |
| Muscle and Blood | Rachel Scott | |
| Working | Studs Terkel | |
| Gossip from the Forest | Thomas Keneally | |