ShelfEvidentPulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
2025 Winner
2025 Shortlist & Longlist
Shortlist
Complete History
2020s
- 2025To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — Benjamin Nathans
- 2024A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy — Nathan Thrall
- 2023His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice — Robert Samuels
- 2022Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City — Andrea Elliott
- 2021Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy — David Zucchino
- 2020The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America — Greg Grandin
2010s
- 2019Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America — Eliza Griswold
- 2018Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America — James Forman Jr.
- 2017Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City — Matthew Desmond
- 2016Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS — Joby Warrick
- 2015The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History — Elizabeth Kolbert
- 2014Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation — Dan Fagin
- 2013Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America — Gilbert King
- 2012The Swerve: How the World Became Modern — Stephen Greenblatt
- 2011The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer — Siddhartha Mukherjee
- 2010The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy — David E. Hoffman
2000s
- 2009Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II — Douglas A. Blackmon
- 2008The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer
- 2007The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 — Lawrence Wright
- 2006Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya — Caroline Elkins
- 2005Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 — Steve Coll
- 2004Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps — Anne Applebaum
- 2003A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide — Samantha Power
- 2002Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution — Diane McWhorter
- 2001Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan — Herbert P. Bix
- 2000Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower
1990s
- 1999Annals of the Former World — John McPhee
- 1998Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies — Jared Diamond
- 1997Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris — Richard Kluger
- 1996The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism — Tina Rosenberg
- 1995The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time — Jonathan Weiner
- 1994Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire — David Remnick
- 1993Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America — Garry Wills
- 1992The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power — Daniel Yergin
- 1991The Ants — Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
- 1990And Their Children after Them — Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson
1980s
- 1989A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam — Neil Sheehan
- 1988The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes
- 1987Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land — David K. Shipler
- 1986Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White — Joseph Lelyveld
- 1985"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II — Studs Terkel
- 1984The Social Transformation of American Medicine — Paul Starr
- 1983Is There No Place on Earth for Me? — Susan Sheehan
- 1982The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder
- 1981Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture — Carl E. Schorske
- 1980Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas Hofstadter
1970s
- 1979On Human Nature — Edward O. Wilson
- 1978The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence — Carl Sagan
- 1977Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay — William W. Warner
- 1976Why Survive?: Being Old in America — Robert N. Butler
- 1975Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
- 1974The Denial of Death — Ernest Becker
- 1973Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III — Robert Coles
- 1972Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 — Barbara W. Tuchman
- 1971The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 — John Toland
- 1970Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence — Erik Erikson
1960s
- 1969So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events — René Dubos
- 1968The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution — Ariel Durant and Will Durant
- 1967The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture — David Brion Davis
- 1966Wandering through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Winter — Edwin Way Teale
- 1965O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years — Howard Mumford Jones
- 1964Anti-Intellectualism in American Life — Richard Hofstadter
- 1963The Guns of August — Barbara W. Tuchman
- 1962The Making of the President 1960 — Theodore H. White
About the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is awarded annually for a distinguished and appropriately documented book of nonfiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category. Administered by Columbia University, it is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. The prize carries a cash award of $15,000 and a certificate. The category was established in 1962 to recognize the broad range of nonfiction writing that does not fall neatly into biography, history, or other specific categories. It has since recognized some of the most important works of reportage, science writing, social commentary, and cultural criticism produced in America. Two authors have won multiple prizes in this category: Barbara W. Tuchman (1963 and 1972) and Edward O. Wilson (1979 and 1991). The award reflects the Pulitzer Board's commitment to honoring nonfiction that illuminates the human condition through rigorous research and compelling prose. Finalists are announced alongside the winner, typically two or three additional titles that were under serious consideration, giving readers a broader view of the year's most distinguished nonfiction. The prize is announced each spring, usually in May, following deliberation by a jury and the full Pulitzer Board at Columbia University. Eligible works must have been published during the previous calendar year by an American author.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The prize is open to American authors who publish a distinguished, appropriately documented book of nonfiction during the calendar year, provided the work is not eligible for any other Pulitzer category such as History or Biography.
- Winners receive $15,000 and a certificate. Finalists receive certificates but no cash prize.
- Winners are announced each spring, typically in May, by the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University.
- A jury of distinguished journalists, authors, and scholars reviews submitted works and nominates finalists to the Pulitzer Board, which makes the final selection.
- No. Books eligible for History or Biography categories are generally entered in those more specific categories. General Nonfiction is intended for works that do not fit neatly into the other nonfiction categories.
- Yes. Barbara W. Tuchman won in 1963 and 1972, and Edward O. Wilson won in 1979 and 1991.
- Yes. Co-authored books are eligible, and the prize is shared between authors. For example, in 2023 the prize was awarded jointly to Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa.