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)