National Book Award for Nonfiction


The National Book Award for Nonfiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize outstanding literary work by U.S. citizens. They are awards "by writers to writers". The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field".
The original National Book Awards recognized the "Most Distinguished" biography and nonfiction books of 1935 and 1936, and the "Favorite" nonfiction books of 1937 to 1940. The "Bookseller Discovery" and the "Most Original Book" sometimes recognized nonfiction.
The general "Nonfiction" award was one of three when the National Book Awards were re-established in 1950 for 1949 publications, which the National Book Foundation considers the origin of its current Awards series.
From 1964 to 1983, under different administrators, there were multiple nonfiction categories.
The current Nonfiction award recognizes one book written by a US citizen and published in the US from December 1 to November 30. The National Book Foundation accepts nominations from publishers until June 15, requires mailing nominated books to the panelists by August 1, and announces five finalists in October. The winner is announced on the day of the final ceremony in November. The award is $10,000 and a bronze sculpture; other finalists get $1000, a medal, and a citation written by the panel.
The sculpture by Louise Nevelson dates from the 1980 awards. The $10,000 and $1000 cash prizes and autumn recognition for current-year publications date from 1984.
About 200 books were nominated for the 1984 award, when the single award for general nonfiction was restored.

Finalists

Nonfiction 1984 to present

The winner is listed first followed by the finalists.
1984: Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845
  • Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James
  • Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography
  • Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka
  • Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
1985: J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
1986: Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
  • John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
  • Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Times of the New York Herald Tribune
  • Michael S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway
  • Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter
1987: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
1988: Neil Sheehan,
  • Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
  • Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time
  • Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom
  • Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder
1989: Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem
1990: Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
  • Samuel G. Freedman, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School
  • Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
  • Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, '
  • T.H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1847–1952
1991: Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
1992: Paul Monette,
1993: Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952–1992
  • William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
  • David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
  • Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
  • Peter Svenson, Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground
1994: Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
  • John Putnam Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
  • Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas
  • John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers, Sons, Race and Society
  • Tobias Wolff, In Pharoah's Army: Memories of the Lost War
1995: Tina Rosenberg,
  • Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
  • Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life
  • Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action
  • Maryanne Vollers, Ghosts of Mississippi
1996: James P. Carroll, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us
  • Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing
  • Paul Hendrickson, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War
  • Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958
  • Anne Roiphe, Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World
1997: Joseph J. Ellis,
  • David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
  • Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
  • Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
  • Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography
1998: Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family
  • Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
  • Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok
  • Beth Kephart, A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage
  • Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
1999: John W. Dower,
  • Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography
  • Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
  • John Phillip Santos, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation
  • Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
2000: Nathaniel Philbrick,
2001: Andrew Solomon,
2002: Robert A. Caro,
  • Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution
  • Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
  • Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man
  • Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes
2003: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
2004: Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
  • David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing
  • Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
  • Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
  • The 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States- Authorized Edition
2005: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
2006: Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
  • Taylor Branch, '
  • Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
  • Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
  • Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
2007: Tim Weiner,
2008: Annette Gordon-Reed,
  • Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
  • Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
  • Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
  • Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order
2009: T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
2010: Patti Smith, Just Kids
  • Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
  • John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq
  • Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
  • Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
2011: Stephen Greenblatt,
2012: Katherine Boo,
  • Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956
  • Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
  • Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas
  • Anthony Shadid, '
2013: George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
  • Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
  • Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
  • Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
  • Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
2014: Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
  • Roz Chast, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
  • Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among The Living
  • John Lahr, Tennessee Williams
  • E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
2015: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
  • Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
  • Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
  • Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran
  • Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A Memoir
2016: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
  • Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  • Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
  • Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
  • Heather Ann Thompson, '
2017: Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
  • Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
  • Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
  • David Grann, '
  • Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
2018: Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
2019: Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House
For the 1963/1964 cycle, three new award categories replaced "Nonfiction": Arts and Letters; History and Biography; Science, Philosophy and Religion. For the next twenty years there were at least three award categories for nonfiction books marketed to adult readers and the term "Nonfiction" was used only 1980 to 1983.
timespanof all
awards		list of "Nonfiction" categories covered [|below]
1964–19663 of 5Arts and Letters; History and Biography; Science, Philosophy and Religion
1967–19683 of 6Arts and Letters; History and Biography; Science, Philosophy and Religion
1969–19713 of 7Arts and Letters; History and Biography; "The Sciences" or "Philosophy and Religion" alternating
1972–19756 of 10Arts and Letters; Biography; Contemporary Affairs; History; Philosophy and Religion; The Sciences
19763 of 6Arts and Letters; Contemporary Affairs; History and Biography
1977–19793 of 7Biography and Autobiography; Contemporary Thought; History
198016 of 30+Autobiography; Biography; Current Interest; General Nonfiction; History; Religion/Inspiration; Science
1981–19838 of 20+Autobiography/Biography; General Nonfiction; History; Science

Nonfiction subcategories, 1964 to 1979

Nonfiction subcategories, 1980 to 1983

From 1980 to 1983 there were dual awards for hardcover and paperback books in all nonfiction subcategories and some others. Most of the paperback award winners were second and later editions that had been previously eligible in their first editions. Here the first edition publication year is given parenthetically except the calendar year preceding the award is represented by "".
Nonfiction finalists, 1984 to date

1983/1984

1983 entries were published during 1982, the pattern established for 1949 books in 1950. Winners in 27 categories were announced April 13 and privately celebrated April 28, 1983.
The awards practically went out of business that spring. Their salvation with a reduced program to be determined was announced in November. The revamp was completed only next summer, with an autumn program recognizing books published during the award year. There were no awards for books published in 1983 before November.
By this time the awards were sponsored by the book publishers alone. From 1980 they were termed "American Book Awards", and the National Book Awards were considered to have been discontinued after 1979.
1984 entries for the "revamped" awards in merely three categories were published November 1983 to October 1984; that is, approximately during the award year. Eleven finalists were announced October 17. Winners were announced and celebrated November 15, 1984.

Nonfiction 1950 to 1963

The first awards in the current series were presented to the best books of 1949 at the annual convention dinner of the booksellers, book publishers, and book manufacturers in New York City, March 16, 1950. There were honorable mentions in the non-fiction category only.
1950: Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
  • Harry Allen Overstreet, The Mature Mind
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember
  • Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
  • Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General
1951: Newton Arvin, Herman Melville
1952: Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
  • 16 other finalists.
1953: Bernard De Voto, The Course of Empire
1954: Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox
  • No runners up.
1955: Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man
1956: Herbert Kubly, An American in Italy
  • 12 other finalists.
1957: George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War'
  • 17 other finalists.
1958: Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne
  • 13 other finalists.
1959: J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël
  • 12 other finalists.
1960: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
  • 28 other finalists.
1961: William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
  • 11 other finalists.
1962: Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects
  • 12 other finalists.
1963: Leon Edel, Henry James'', volumes II and III
The National Book Awards for 1935 to 1940 annually recognized the "most distinguished" or "favorite" book of General Nonfiction or simply Nonfiction. In 1935 and 1936 there was distinct award to the most distinguished Biography; both winners were autobiographies. Meanwhile, four of the six general nonfiction winners were autobiographical and one more was a biography. Furthermore, all books were eligible for the "Bookseller Discovery" and "Most Original Book" ; nonfiction winners are listed here. In 1937 and 1939 alone, the New York Times reported close seconds and runners up respectively.
There was only one National Book Award for 1941, the Bookseller Discovery, which recognized a novel; then none until their 1950 revival for 1949 books in three categories including general Nonfiction.

Nonfiction

1935: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient
1936: Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England: 1815–1865
1937: Ève Curie, Madame Curie
1938: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Listen! The Wind
1939: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
1940: Hans Zinsser, As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S.

Bookseller Discovery (1936 to 1941)

1936: see fiction
1937: see fiction
1938: David Fairchild, The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer
1939: see fiction
1940: Perry Burgess, Who Walk Alone
1941: see fiction

Most Original Book (1935 to 1939)

1935: see fiction
1936: Della T. Lutes, The Country Kitchen
1937: Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad, of an American Living in China, and What They Taught Him
1938: Margaret Halsey, With Malice Toward Some
1939: see fiction

Repeat winners

Three books have won two literary National Book Awards, all in nonfiction subcategories of 1964 to 1983.
Matthiessen and Thomas won three Awards. Matthiessen won the 2008 fiction award. Thomas is one of several authors of two Award-winning books in nonfiction categories.