1989  Merrill Gilfillan, Magpie Rising (Pruett Publishing Company)

1990  Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

1991  Gerald Marzorati, A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and Our Times (Viking)

1992  Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land (Knopf)

1993  David Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica (Houghton Mifflin)

1994  Michael Kelly, Martyr’s Day: Chronicle of a Small War (Random House)

1995  Louise Gluck, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco)

1996  Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club (Viking)

1997  Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins)

1998  Serge Schmemann, Echoes of a Native Land (Knopf)

1999  Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

2000  Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files (Dial)

2001  Charles Siefe, Zero (Viking)

2002  Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder (Pantheon)

2003  Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain (Houghton)

2004  Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

2005  Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W.W. Norton & Company)

2006  Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red (Harpercollins) and Marjorie Williams, The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writing on Politics, Family, and Fate (Public Affairs)