Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

The Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction has been awarded since 1962 for a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in another category. A single prize is awarded annually. Finalists have been announced since 1980.

1960s

• 1962: The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White
• 1963: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
• 1964: Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
• 1965: O Strange New World by Howard Mumford Jones
• 1966: Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale
• 1967: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis
• 1968: Rousseau and Revolution, vol. 10 of The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant.
• 1969: So Human an Animal by Rene Jules Dubos
• 1969: The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

1970s

• 1970: Gandhi's Truth by Erik H. Erikson
• 1971: The Rising Sun by John Toland
• 1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman
• 1973: Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald
• 1973: Children of Crisis, vols. 2 and 3, by Robert Coles
• 1974: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
• 1975: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• 1976: Why Survive? Being Old In America by Robert Neil Butler
• 1977: Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner
• 1978: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
• 1979: On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson

1980s

Finalists have been announced since 1980, and are shown as the indented entries.

• 1980: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
  • The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
  • The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas
• 1981: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske
  • China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
  • Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester
  • Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey by Marshall Frady
• 1982: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
  • Basin and Range by John McPhee
  • Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor by Diana Trilling
• 1983: Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan
  • The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
  • Terrorists and Novelists by Diane Johnson
• 1984: The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr
  • Conversations With the Enemy by Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer
  • Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny
• 1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel
  • Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny
  • Dawn to the West by Donald Keene
• 1986 (two winners): Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas
• Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White by Joseph Lelyveld
  • Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life by Robert Neelly Bellah
• 1987: Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler
  • Rising from the Plains by John McPhee
  • Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir by Cyra McFadden
• 1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
  • Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
  • Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society by Daniel Callahan
• 1989: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
  • The Last Farmer by Howard Kohn
  • Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

1990s

• 1990: And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson
  • Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
  • A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 by David Fromkin
• 1991: The Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
  • Looking for a Ship by John McPhee
  • River of Traps: A Village Life by William duBuys and Alex Harris
• 1992: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin
  • Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall
  • Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus
• 1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills
  • Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez
  • Where the Buffalo Roam by Anne Matthews
  • A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War by Susan Griffin
• 1994: Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick
  • The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud by Peter Gay
  • The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age by John Lukacs
• 1995: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner
  • How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland
  • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt
• 1996: The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg
  • Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
• 1997: Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger
  • Fame and Folly by Cynthia Ozick
  • The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond by Samuel G. Freedman
• 1998: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
  • How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
  • Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
• 1999: Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
  • The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris
  • Crime and Punishment in America by Elliott Currie

2000s

• 2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
  • The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
  • Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul
• 2001: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  • Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover
• 2002: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter
  • The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
  • War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam
• 2003: "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
  • The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit by Ellen Meloy
  • The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• 2004: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
  • The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military by Dana Priest
  • Rembrandt's Jews by Steven Nadler
• 2005: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll
  • The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea
  • Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
• 2006: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
  • The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer
  • Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
• 2007: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
  • Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness by Pete Earley
  • Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks
• 2008: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander
  • The Cigarette Century by Allan M. Brandt
  • The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
• 2009: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
  • The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcock
  • Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur L. Herman

2010s

• 2010: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman
  • The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
  • How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy
• 2011: Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr
  • Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
• 2012: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
  • One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing by Diane Ackerman
  • Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl

See also

• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

External links

• List of General Nonfiction Winners, Pulitzer Prizes.