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 by (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 Mortality (Ivan R. Dee)