| Year |
|
Winner |
Winner Work |
| 2009 |
|
Eula Biss |
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays |
| 2008 |
|
Seth Lerer |
Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter |
| 2007 |
|
Alex Ross |
The Rest Is Noise |
| 2006 |
|
Lawrence Weschler |
Everything That Rises |
| 2005 |
|
William Logan |
The Undiscovered Country |
| 2004 |
|
Patrick Neate |
Where You're at |
| 2003 |
|
Rebecca Solnit |
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West |
| 2002 |
|
William H. Gass |
Test of Time |
| 2001 |
|
Martin Amis |
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 |
| 2000 |
|
Cynthia Ozick |
Quarrel & quandary |
| 1999 |
|
Jorge Luis Borges |
Selected Non-fictions |
| 1998 |
|
Gary Giddins |
Visions of Jazz |
| 1997 |
|
Mario Vargas Llosa |
Making Waves |
| 1996 |
|
William H. Gass |
Finding a Form |
| 1995 |
|
Robert Darnton |
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France |
| 1994 |
|
Gerald Early |
The Culture of Bruising |
| 1993 |
|
John Dizikes |
Opera in America |
| 1992 |
|
Garry Wills |
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America |
| 1991 |
|
Lawrence L. Langer |
Holocaust Testimonies |
| 1990 |
|
Arthur Danto |
Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present |
| 1989 |
|
John Clive |
Not by fact alone |
| 1988 |
|
Clifford Geertz |
Works and Lives |
| 1987 |
|
Edwin Denby |
Dance writings |
| 1986 |
|
Joseph Brodsky |
Less than one |
| 1985 |
|
William H. Gass |
Habitations of the Word |
| 1984 |
|
Robert Hass |
Twentieth century pleasures |
| 1983 |
|
John Updike |
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism |
| 1982 |
|
Gore Vidal |
The Second American Revolution and Other Essays |
| 1981 |
|
Virgil Thomson |
A Virgil Thomson Reader |
| 1980 |
|
Helen Vendler |
Part of nature, part of us |
| 1979 |
|
Elaine Pagels |
The Gnostic Gospels |
| 1978 |
|
Meyer Schapiro |
Modern Art |
| 1977 |
|
Susan Sontag |
On Photography |
| 1976 |
|
Bruno Bettelheim |
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales |
| 1975 |
|
Paul Fussell |
The Great War and Modern Memory |
