2022: Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature by Farah Jasmine Griffin (W. W. Norton)
2021: My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir by Jenn Shapland (Tin House Books)
2020: What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah Price (Basic Books)
2019: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry (Beacon Press)
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)
1954:The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M. H. Abrams (Oxford University Press)