1990  Bernard Knox, Essays Ancient and Modern (Johns Hopkins)

1991  Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford)

1992  David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (University of California)

1993  Frederick Crews, The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (Random House)

1994  Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…And It’s A Good Thing Too (Oxford)

1995  John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (Yale)

1996  Thomas Nagel, Other Minds (Oxford)

1997  Cynthia Ozick, Fame and Folly (Knopf)

1998  Adam Hochschild, Finding the Trapdoor (Univ. of Syracuse)

1999  Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam (Houghton Mifflin)

2000  Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (Knopf)

2001  David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino (Scribner)

2002  David Bromwich, Skeptical Music (University of Chicago)

2003  William H. Gass, Test of Time (Knopf)

2004  Stewart Justman, Seeds of Mortalitiy (Floyd Skloot)

[The award went on hiatus from 2005-2010]

2011  Mark Slouka, Nick of Time (Graywolf Press)

Runners-Up:
Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Alex Ross, Listen to This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2012  Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (Twelve)

Runners-Up:
André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
Robert Gottlieb, Lives and Letters

2013  Robert Hass, What Light Can Do (Ecco)

Runners-Up:
Jill Lepore, The Story of America (Princeton University Press)
Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York Review Books)

2014  James Wolcott, Critical Mass (Doubleday)

2015  Ian Buruma, Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War (New York Review Books)

2016  Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau/ Random House)

2017 Angela Morales, The Girls in My Town (University of New Mexico Press)