National Book Award: nonfiction

The National Book Awards are annual American awards honoring American writers for books published in the United States. The awards were established in 1936, abandoned during World War Two, and reestablished in 1950. Multiple nonfiction categories were introduced in 1964, but the single, comprehensive nonfiction category was restored 20 years later. So, after the awards were reestablished in 1950, nonfiction existed as an all-inclusive category from 1950 through 1963, and again from 1984 to the present.

2024: Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, by Jason De Léon

2023: The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, by Ned Blackhawk

2022: South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dizon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry

2021: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles

2020: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

2019: The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom

2018: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, by Jeffrey C. Stewart

2017: The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen

2016: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibra X. Kendi

2015: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

2014: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos

2013: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer

2012: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

2011: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

2010: Just Kids, by Patti Smith

2009: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles

2008: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed

2007: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner

2006: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

2005: The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

2004: Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle

2003: Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire

2002: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro

2001: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon

2000: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick

1999: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, by John W. Dower

1998: Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball

1997: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, by Joseph J. Ellis

1996: An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, by James P. Carroll

1995: The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, by Tina Rosenberg

1994: How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, by Sherwin B. Nuland

1993: United States: Essays 1952-1992, by Gore Vidal

1992: Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, by Paul Monette

1991: Freedom: Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, by Orlando Patterson

1990: The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance, by Ron Chernow

1989: From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman

1988: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan

1987: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes

1986: Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez

1985: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, by J. Anthony Lukas

1984: Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845, by Robert V. Remini

Several new nonfiction categories were introduced in 1964, and still more changes in the categories were made in the years that followed. I am not including this proliferation of nonfiction subcategories here. The single, comprehensive nonfiction category was restored in 1984.

1963: Henry James, volumes II and III, by Leon Edel

1962: The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford

1961: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

1960: James Joyce, by Richard Ullmann

1959: Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël, by J. Christopher Herold

1958: The Lion and the Throne, by Catherine Drinker Bowen

1957: Russia Leaves the War, by George F. Kennan

1956: An American in Italy, by Herbert Kubly

1955: The Measure of Man, by Joseph Wood Krutch

1954: A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton

1953: The Course of Empire, by Bernard A. DeVoto

1952: The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson

1951: Herman Melville, by Newton Arvin

1950: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Ralph L. Rusk