Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction — Complete Winners List

64 years of winners · Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University · Since 1962 · ← Back to award page

Year	Title	Author	Publisher
2025	To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement	Benjamin Nathans	Princeton University Press
2024	A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy	Nathan Thrall	Metropolitan Books
2023	His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice	Robert Samuels	Viking
2022	Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City	Andrea Elliott	Random House
2021	Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy	David Zucchino	Atlantic Monthly Press
2020	The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America	Greg Grandin	Metropolitan Books
2019	Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America	Eliza Griswold	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2018	Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America	James Forman Jr.	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2017	Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City	Matthew Desmond	Crown
2016	Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS	Joby Warrick	Doubleday
2015	The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History	Elizabeth Kolbert	Henry Holt and Company
2014	Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation	Dan Fagin	Bantam Books
2013	Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America	Gilbert King	Harper
2012	The Swerve: How the World Became Modern	Stephen Greenblatt	W. W. Norton & Company
2011	The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer	Siddhartha Mukherjee	Scribner
2010	The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy	David E. Hoffman	—
2009	Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II	Douglas A. Blackmon	—
2008	The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945	Saul Friedländer	—
2007	The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11	Lawrence Wright	—
2006	Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya	Caroline Elkins	—
2005	Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001	Steve Coll	—
2004	Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps	Anne Applebaum	—
2003	A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide	Samantha Power	—
2002	Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution	Diane McWhorter	—
2001	Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan	Herbert P. Bix	—
2000	Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II	John W. Dower	—
1999	Annals of the Former World	John McPhee	—
1998	Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies	Jared Diamond	—
1997	Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris	Richard Kluger	—
1996	The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism	Tina Rosenberg	—
1995	The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time	Jonathan Weiner	—
1994	Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire	David Remnick	—
1993	Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America	Garry Wills	—
1992	The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power	Daniel Yergin	—
1991	The Ants	Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson	—
1990	And Their Children after Them	Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson	—
1989	A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam	Neil Sheehan	—
1988	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Richard Rhodes	—
1987	Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land	David K. Shipler	—
1986	Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White	Joseph Lelyveld	—
1985	"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II	Studs Terkel	—
1984	The Social Transformation of American Medicine	Paul Starr	—
1983	Is There No Place on Earth for Me?	Susan Sheehan	—
1982	The Soul of a New Machine	Tracy Kidder	—
1981	Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture	Carl E. Schorske	—
1980	Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid	Douglas Hofstadter	—
1979	On Human Nature	Edward O. Wilson	—
1978	The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence	Carl Sagan	—
1977	Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay	William W. Warner	—
1976	Why Survive?: Being Old in America	Robert N. Butler	—
1975	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek	Annie Dillard	—
1974	The Denial of Death	Ernest Becker	—
1973	Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III	Robert Coles	—
1972	Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945	Barbara W. Tuchman	—
1971	The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945	John Toland	—
1970	Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence	Erik Erikson	—
1969	So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events	René Dubos	—
1968	The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution	Ariel Durant and Will Durant	—
1967	The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture	David Brion Davis	—
1966	Wandering through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Winter	Edwin Way Teale	—
1965	O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years	Howard Mumford Jones	—
1964	Anti-Intellectualism in American Life	Richard Hofstadter	—
1963	The Guns of August	Barbara W. Tuchman	—
1962	The Making of the President 1960	Theodore H. White	—