The Pulitzer Prize, started by New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), is awarded each year for books published the previous year. During some years no award was given.

2010 – The dead hand : the untold story of the Cold War arms race and its dangerous legacy , by David E. Hoffman.

2009 – Slavery by another name : the re-enslavement of Black people in America from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon.

2008 – The years of extermination : Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, by Saul Friedländer

2007 – The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

2006 – Imperial reckoning : the untold story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, by Caroline Elkins

2005 – Ghost wars : the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll

2004 – Gulag : a history, by Anne Applebaum

2003 – “A problem from hell” : America and the age of genocide, by Samantha Power

2002 – Carry me home : Birmingham, Alabama : the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution, by Diane McWhorter

2001 – Hirohito and the making of modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix

2000 – Embracing defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II, by John W. Dower

1999 – Annals of the former world, by John McPhee

1998 – Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies, by Jared Diamond

1997 – Ashes to ashes : America’s hundred-year cigarette war, the public health, and the unabashed triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger

1996 – The haunted land : facing Europe’s ghosts after communism, by Tina Rosenberg

1995 – The beak of the finch : a story of evolution in our time, by Jonathan Weiner

1994 – Lenin’s tomb : the last days of the Soviet Empire, by David Remnick

1993 – Lincoln at Gettysburg : the words that remade America, by Garry Wills

1992 – The prize : the epic quest for oil, money & power, by Daniel Yergin

1991 – The ants, by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson

1990 – And their children after them : the legacy of Let us now praise famous men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the rise and fall of cotton in the South, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamsoni

1989 – A bright shining lie : John Paul Vann and American in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan

1988 – The making of the atomic bomb, by Richard Rhodes

1987 – Arab and Jew : wounded spirits in a promised land, by David K. Shipler

1986 – Common ground : a turbulent decade in the lives of three American families, by J. Anthony Lukas
and Move your shadow : South Africa Black and White, by Joseph Lelyveld

1985 – “The good war”, an oral history of World War Twor, by Studs Terkel

1984 – The social transformation of American medicine, by Paul Starr

1983 – Is there no place on earth for me?, by Susan Sheehan

1982 – The soul of a new machine, by Tracy Kidder

1981 – Fin-de-siecle Vienna : politics and culture, by Carl E. Schorske

1980 – Godel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter

1979 – On human nature, by Edward O. Wilson

1978 – The dragons of eden : speculations on the evolution of human intelligence, by Carl Sagan

1977 – Beautiful swimmers : watermen, crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, by William W. Warner

1976 – Why survive? : being old in America, by Robert N. Butler

1975 – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

1974 – The denial of death, by Ernest Becker

1973 – Fire in the lake : the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, by Francis FitzGerald
and Children of crisis – volumes II and III, by Robert Coles

1972 – Stilwell and the American experience in China, 1911-1945, by Barbara W. Tuchman

1971 – The rising sun, by John Toland

1970 – Gandhi’s truth on the origins of militant nonviolence, by Eric H. Erikson

1969 – The armies of the night : history as a novel, the novel as history, by Norman Mailer
and So human an animal : how we are shaped by surroundings and events , by Rene Jules Dubos

1968 – Rousseau and revolution (The story of civilization, volume 10), by Will and Ariel Durant

1967 – The problem of slavery in Western culture, by David Brion Davis

1966 – Wandering through winter, by Edwin Way Teale

1965 – O strange new world : American culture: the formative years, by Howard Mumford Jones

1964 – Anti-intellectualism in American life, by Richard Hofstadter

1963 – The guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman

1962 – The making of the president 1960, by Theodore H. White

Categories: Award Winners,Book Buzz,Booklists,Nonfiction