Literary Award – Books

Literary Award – Awardees and Finalists
For information about the award, including how to apply, please click here.
2024 Finalists

Elizabeth A. Athens
William Bartram's Visual Wonders
University of Pittsburgh Press

Emma Copley Eisenberg
Housemates
Hogarth

Howard Langer
The Last Dekrepitzer
Cresheim Press

Annie Liontas
Sex With a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC

Liz Moore
The God of the Woods
Riverhead Books

Benjamin Nathans
To the Success of our Hopeless Cause
Princeton University Press

2023 Awardees

David Amadio
Rug Man
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books

David S. Barnes
Lazaretto: How Philadelphia Used an Unpopular Quarantine Based on Disputed Science to Accommodate Immigrants and Prevent Epidemics
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

2023 Finalists

Ayana Mathis
The Unsettled
Alfred A. Knopf

Ben Stanger
From One Cell
W.W. Norton & Company

Joseph Earl Thomas
Sink: A Memoir
Grand Central Publishing

Steven Ujifusa
The Last Ships from Hamburg
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

2022 Finalists

Alice Elliott Dark
Fellowship Point
Simon & Schuster

Jonathan M. Katz
Gangsters of Capitalism
St. Martin’s Press

Michael Meyer
Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet
Mariner Books

2021 Awardees

Quiara Alegría Hudes
My Broken Language
One World

Miles Orvell
Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction
Oxford University Press

2021 Finalists

Cordelia Frances Biddle
Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil
Oxford Southern, an imprint of Sunbury Press, Inc.

Kareem Rosser
Crossing the Line
St. Martin's Press

Anthony R. Wood
Snow: A History of the World’s Most Fascinating Flake
Prometheus Books

2020 Awardees

Lynn Miller and Therese Dolan
Salut!: France Meets Philadelphia
Temple University Press

Michele Harper
The Beauty in Breaking
Riverhead Books

2020 Finalists

Susan Abulhawa
Against the Loveless World
Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Kiley Reid
Such a Fun Age: A Novel
G.P. Putnam's Sons

2018 Awardees

Madeline Miller
Circe: A Novel
Little, Brown and Company

Patrick Spero
Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776
W.W. Norton & Company

2017 Awardees

Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Never Caught: the Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge
37 Ink/Atria

Carol Eaton Soltis
The Art of the Peales in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Adaptations and Innovations
Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press

2016 Awardees

Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Henry Holt and Company

Judith Stein
Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2015 Awardees

David Grazian
American Zoo: A Sociological Safari
Princeton University Press

Barbara Miller Lane
Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs
Princeton University Press

2013 Awardees

Adrian Raine
The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime
Pantheon Books

George H. Marcus and William Whitaker
The Houses of Louis Kahn
Yale University Press

2011 - no award

2009 Awardee

Richard Beeman
Plain, Honest Men: The Making of The American Constitution
Random House

2007 Awardee

Jon Clinch
Finn: A Novel
Random House

2005 Awardee

Kermit Roosevelt
In the Shadow of the Law
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2004 Awardee

Roger W. Moss
Historic Sacred Places of Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania Press

2003 Awardee

Jack Repcheck
The Man Who Found Time
Perseus

2002 Awardees

Jane Golden, Robin Rice & Monica Yant Kinney
Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell
Temple University Press

Charlene Mires
Independence Hall in American Memory
University of Pennsylvania Press

2001 - no award

2000 Awardees

Susan Sidlauskas
Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting
Cambridge University Press

Patricia Tyson Stroud
The Emperor of Nature; Charles-Lucien Bonaparte and His World
University of Pennsylvania Press

George E. Thomas
William L. Price: Arts and Crafts to Modern Design
Princeton Architectural Press

Ben Yagoda
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
Scribner

1999 Awardees

J. Welles Henderson and Rodney P. Carlisle
Marine Art & Antiques: Jack Tar ; A Sailor's Life 1750-1910
Antique Collectors' Club

Witold Rybczynski
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century
Scribner

Jonathan Weiner
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavior
Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House

1998 Awardees

James J. O'Donnell
Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
Harvard University Press

Leonard Warren
Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything
Yale University Press

1997 Awardees

A.C. Elias, Jr. (editor)
Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington
University of Georgia Press

Kathleen A. Foster and Kenneth Finkel
Captain Watson's Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772-1818
University of Pennsylvania Press

David P. Silverman (general editor)
Ancient Egypt
Oxford University Press

David P. Silverman (editor)
Searching for Ancient Egypt: Art, Architecture, and Artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Dallas Museum of Art, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Cornell University Press

Mary Walton
Car: A Drama of the American Workplace
W. W. Norton

1996 Awardees

Peter Conn
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
Cambridge University Press

Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Tumbling
William Morrow and Company, Inc.

1995 Awardees

Thomas Childers
Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II
Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Witold Rybczynski
City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World
Scribner

Susan Stewart
The Forest
University of Chicago Press

1993 Awardees

Susan Q. Stranahan
Susquehanna, River of Dreams
Johns Hopkins University Press

Seymour I. Toll
A Judge Uncommon: A Life of John Biggs, Jr.
Legal Communications

1992 Awardee

Arthur Power Dudden
The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present
Oxford University Press

1990 Awardees

Paul Halpern
Time Journeys: A Search for Cosmic Destiny and Meaning
McGraw-Hill

Matthews Masayuki Hamabata
Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family
Cornell University Press

Ora Mendels
A Taste for Treason: A Novel
Carol Pub. Group

Camille Paglia
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Yale University Press

1989 Awardees

Coral Lansbury
The Grotto
Knopf

James Snyder
Medieval Art: Painting-Sculpture-Architecture, 4th-14th Century
Prentice-Hall , H.N. Abrams

Emily W. Sunstein
Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality
Little, Brown

1988 Awardees

Marilyn Gaull
English Romanticism: The Human Context
W. W. Norton

Barbara Holland
The Name of the Cat
Dodd, Mead

John Allen Paulos
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Hill and Wang

1987 - no award

1986 Awardees

David Eisenhower
Eisenhower at War, 1943-1945
Random House

Julie Nixon Eisenhower
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
Simon and Schuster

Michael Malone
Handling Sin: A Novel
Little, Brown

Barry Schwartz
The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality, and Modern Life
Norton

1984 Awardees

Roland Mushat Frye
The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600
Princeton University Press

Jean Gordon Lee
Philadelphians and the China Trade, 1784-1844
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philip Chadwick Foster Smith
The Empress of China
Philadelphia Maritime Museum

1983 Awardees

Gerald Carson
The Dentist and the Empress: The Adventures of Dr. Tom Evans in Gas-Lit Paris
Houghton Mifflin Company

Helen Hartman Gemmill
E. L., The Bread Box Papers: A Biography of Elizabeth Chapman Lawrence
Dorrance , Bucks County Historical Society

Edgar P. Richardson
Charles Willson Peale and His World
H. N. Abrams

1982 Awardees

Susan Gray Detweiler
George Washington's Chinaware
Abrams

Desmond Ryan
Deadlines: A Novel
Norton

Jean Seder
Voices of Kensington: Vanishing Mills : Vanishing Neighborhoods
Whitmore Publishing Co.

Seymour Shubin
The Captain: A Novel
Stein & Day

David R. Slavitt
Ringer
Dutton

1981 Awardees

David Bradley
The Chaneysville Incident: A Novel
Harper & Row, Publishers

Daniel Hoffman
Brotherly Love
Vintage Books a division of Random House

John Lukacs
Philadelphia, Patricians & Philistines, 1900-1950
Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Russell F. Weigley
Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945
Indiana University Press

1980 Awardees

Lois G. Forer
Criminals and Victims: A Trial Judge Reflects on Crime and Punishment
Norton

James C. Humes
Churchill: Speaker of the Century
Stein and Day

Arthur R. G. Solmssen
A Princess in Berlin: A Novel
Little, Brown

1979 Awardees

E. Digby Baltzell
Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership
Free Press

Richard J. Boyle
John Twachtman
Watson Guptill

Dorothy Shipley White
Black Africa and De Gaulle: From the French Empire to Independence
Pennsylvania State University Press

1978 Awardees

Peggy Anderson
Nurse
St. Martin's Press

Elizabeth Gray Vining
Being Seventy: The Measure of a Year
Viking Press

Anthony F. C. Wallace
Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution
Knopf

Jan Westcott
A Woman of Quality
Putnam

1976 - no award

1974 Awardee

John R. Coleman
Blue-Collar Journal: A College President's Sabbatical
Lippincott

1973 Awardee

John Maass
The Glorious Enterprise: the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief
Published for the Institute for the Study of Universal History Through Arts and Artifacts, by the American Life Foundation

1971 Awardee

Loren Eiseley
The Night Country
Scribner

1970 - no award

1969 Awardees

Henry Clarence Pitz
The Brandywine Tradition
Houghton Mifflin

Chaim Potok
The Promise
Knopf

1968 Awardees

Ernest Penney Earnest
Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe
Duke University Press

Robert Chester Smith
The Art of Portugal: 1500-1800
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

1967 Awardees

Edmund N. Bacon
Design of Cities
Viking Press

Daniel P. Mannix
The Fox and the Hound
Dutton

1966 Awardee

Edward S. Gifford, Jr.
Father Against the Devil
Doubleday

1965 Awardee

Laurence Davis Lafore
The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I
Weidenfeld and Nicolson

1964 Awardees

Kristin Hunter
God Bless the Child
Charles Scribner's Sons

Elizabeth Gray Vining
Take Heed of Loving Me
Lippincott

Dorothy Shipley White
Seeds of Discord: De Gaulle, Free France, and the Allies
Syracuse University Press

1963 Awardees

Daniel Hoffman
The City of Satisfactions
Oxford University Press

Samuel Noah Kramer
The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character
The University of Chicago Press

1961 Awardees

Roy F. Nichols
The Stakes of Power, 1845-1877
Hill and Wang

Lauren R. Stevens
The Double Axe
Scribner

1960 Awardees

David Taylor
Storm the Last Rampart
J. B. Lippincott Co.

Edwin Wolf II
Rosenbach: A Biography
World Pub. Co.

1959 Awardee

John Canaday
Mainstreams of Modern Art
Simon and Schuster

1958 Awardees

L. Sprague DeCamp
An Elephant for Aristotle
Doubleday

Loren C. Eiseley
Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It
Doubleday

1957 Awardees

Catherine Drinker Bowen
The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634)
Little, Brown

Bettina Linn
A Letter to Elizabeth
Lippincott

1956 Awardees

Livingston L. Biddle Jr.
The Village Beyond
Lippincott

Samuel Noah Kramer
From the Tablets of Summer: 25 Firsts in Man's Recorded History
Falcon's Wing Press

1955 Awardee

Conyers Read
Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth
Knopf

1954 Awardee

Davis Grubb
The Night of the Hunter
Harper & Brothers

1951 Awardee

Arthur Hobson Quinn
The Literature of the American People: An Historical and Critical Survey
Appleton-Century-Crofts

1949 Awardee

John L. Lamonte
The World of the Middle Ages
Appleton-Century-Crofts

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