Announcing the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Winners

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)

For a biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

Winner: Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, Keith O’Brien (Pantheon, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Pete Rose was unpolished, unstoppable, and above all, driven to win, win, and win again. Keith O’Brien’s monumental, nuanced biography—Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball—evokes Rose’s headlong rush in a scrupulously reported, relentless narrative that tracks Rose from his working-class Cincinnati childhood, to his rise and reign and ultimate ruin in baseball. Winning was everything in the Rose cosmos, and that impulse fed the addiction that caused Rose to violate baseball’s cardinal rule against gambling on one’s own games, pulling the lovers, teammates, owners, parasites, bookies, and fans who orbited around him into an inescapable void.

Charlie Hustle is not the first biography of Pete Rose, but it is the first one for which Rose spoke to an author without having some kind of editorial control. According to O’Brien, Rose was cooperative at first, and then, perhaps from shame or fear, cut off communication. In that truncated contact, O’Brien found something profound. Yet the author’s true achievement is in the breadth and depth of his reporting and research, in conversations with dozens upon dozens of sources, in poring over court records and contemporaneous journalism. That wealth of knowledge and understanding is illuminated by O’Brien’s artful, urgent prose, filled with portents and precedents that feel as epic and mythic as the sport itself. In exploring a realm dominated by male characters, O’Brien takes extra care to portray the women in his narrative as important actors with complexity and agency—not as mere collateral damage in Rose’s wreckage.

Like many great biographies, Charlie Hustle is about more than the story of its subject. It is a history of baseball—and particularly the intractable, intertwined relationship between the game and gambling, culminating in Rose’s permanent banishment from the sport, and punctuated by the irony of the emergence of legalized sports betting. It is about the eternal duel between principle and corruption, about the very reasons a collective adopts rules, and what happens when we allow them to be bent, or broken, so that we can have our own, individual victories. And it is a book about working-class America, caught up in that duality. The judges, while reading this book, could not help but feel that the dynamic behind this story—particularly the way in which many of Rose’s white, midwestern fans continued to believe in Rose’s professed innocence even after it was resoundingly debunked—speaks greatly to the current political moment. Our consensus seemed to be confirmed when, after our decision, the current President suggested a posthumous Federal pardon for Pete Rose. The rules are a reflection of our impartial ideal; but their partial application is our reality. 

“Winning is what counts,” Pete Rose once said. “They don’t pay you to lose.” Charlie Hustle is a book about the costs of winning at all costs, and the worthlessness of apologies that come too late. Keith O’Brien has captured, in telling the story of a flawed, fallen American icon, a fable for our American age.”