2018 Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (University of Chicago Press)
2017 Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (Liveright)
2016 The Poetry of John Milton by Gordon Teskey (Harvard University Press)
2015 Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities by James Turner (Princeton University Press)
2014 The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, by Steven Moore (Bloomsbury Academic)
2013 Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures by Claudia L. Johnson (The University of Chicago Press)
2012 A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs (W.W. Norton)
2011 From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature by Randall Fuller (Oxford University Press)
2010 Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II by V.A. Kolve (Stanford University Press)
2009 A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey (The Penguin Press)
2008 Henry James Goes to Paris by Peter Brooks (Princeton University Press)
2007 In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Lineby George Hutchinson (Bellknap Press of the Harvard University Press)
2006 Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading by Virginia Jackson (Princeton University Press)
2005 Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber (Pantheon Books)
2004 Emerson by Lawrence Buell (Harvard University Press)
2003 The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R.F. Foster (Oxford University Press)
2002 Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart (The University of Chicago Press)
2001 Transcendental Wordplay: America's Romantic Punsters & the Search for the Language of Nature by Michael West (Ohio University Press)
2000 Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture by Leonard Barkan (Yale University Press)
1999 Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing by James Olney (University of Chicago Press)
1998 The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises by Theodore Ziolkowski (Princeton University Press)
1997 The Title to the Poem by Anne Ferry (Stanford University Press)
1996 What is Pastoral? by Paul Alpers (University of Chicago Press)
1995 Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 by Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press)
1994 The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story by John T. Irwin (The Johns Hopkins University Press)
1993 To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature by Eric J. Sundquist (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
1992 Chaucer and the Subject of History by Lee Patterson (University of Wisconsin Press)
1991 The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel by Richard D. Altick (Ohio State University Press)
1990 Dostoevsky: Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy by Evelyn Barish (Princeton University Press)
1989 Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present by Harold Bloom (Harvard University Press)
1988 Beneath the American Renaissance: Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds (Harvard University Press)
1987 The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism by Leonard Barkan (Yale University Press)
1986 Alexander Pope: A Life by Maynard Mack (Norton)
1985 The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spense to Yeats by Peter M. Sacks (Johns Hopkins University Press)
1984 Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, Volume III, Dean Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis (Harvard University Press)
1983 The Idea of the Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry by W. R. Johnson (University of California Press)
1982 The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers by Maynard Mack (University of Chicago Press)
1981 Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart by Robert Bernard Martin (Oxford University Press)
1980 The Creation of Nikolai Gogol by Donald L. Fanger (Belknap-Harvard University Press)
1979 The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society by Robert B. Heilman (University of Washington Press)
1978 Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels by Charles R. Anderson (Duke University Press)
1977 Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 by Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press)
1976 T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet by Elisabeth W. Schneider (University of California Press)
1975 Mandelstam by Robert Gittings (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
1974 Young Thomas Hardy by Clarence Brown (Cambridge University Press)
1973 Kings, Beasts, and Heroes by Gwyn Jones (Oxford University Press)
1972 The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner (University of California Press)
1971 Politics in English Romantic Poetry by Carl Woodring (Harvard University Press)
1970 The Burden of the Past and the English Poet by Walter Jackson Bate (Harvard University Press)
1969 Shaw the Dramatist by Louis Crompton (University of Nebraska Press)
1968 Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (University of Chicago Press)
1967 The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation by Larzer Ziff (Viking Press)
1966 The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster by Wilfred Stone (Stanford University Press)
1965 Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 by Geoffrey H. Hartman (Yale University Press)
1964 John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate (Harvard University Press)
1963 Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne by Joan Webber (University of Wisconsin Press)
1962 The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth (University of Chicago Press)
1961 Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise by Charles R. Anderson (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston)
1960 Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion by Reuben Arthur Brower (Oxford University Press)
1959 The Idea of Poetry in France by Margaret Gilman (Harvard University Press)
1958 Homer and the Heroic Tradition by Cedric H. Whitman (Harvard University Press)
1957 The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870 by Walter E. Houghton (Yale University Press)
1956 The Achievement of Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate (Oxford University Press)
1955 The Poetry of Meditation by Louis L. Martz (Yale University Press)
1954The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M. H. Abrams (Oxford University Press)