The Board's Veto Power and the Three-Step Process: How Pulitzer Prize Winners Are Selected

For any novelist, playwright, or investigative reporter to actually take home a Pulitzer Prize, a highly specific and somewhat awkward condition has to hold: the domain experts who read the work must love it, and the room full of generalist executives who sign the checks must agree not to veto them. Most years, that fragile truce holds. The jury of specialists quietly forwards three unranked finalists, and the nineteen-member Pulitzer Prize Board politely selects one, handing out the $15,000 checks and the gold medals without much fuss. But the system is explicitly designed to allow the executives to overrule the experts—and when they do, the resulting collisions expose the tension between artistic merit and institutional prestige.[2][6][7]

The Pulitzer process is widely misunderstood as a simple popular vote among critics. In reality, it is a strict two-tiered system administered by Columbia University, operating under the rules established by Joseph Pulitzer's will in 1917. The first tier relies on specialized juries. Each year, more than one hundred jurors are appointed to serve on twenty-two separate panels covering the twenty-three award categories. A jury typically consists of five members—usually working novelists for the fiction prize, or veteran reporters and editors for the journalism categories—who spend months reading hundreds of submissions.[1][5][6]

These juries act as the primary filter, but they are not the ultimate deciders. Their explicit mandate is to submit exactly three finalists to the Pulitzer Board. Crucially, the juries are forbidden from ranking these three choices or officially expressing a preference among them. They provide a written statement of merit for each nominated entry, but procedurally, they are simply handing the Board a flat menu of acceptable options.[1]

The Pulitzer Prize Board itself is a different beast entirely. Composed of nineteen members—predominantly senior journalists, news executives, and academics, alongside the dean of the Columbia journalism school—the Board meets twice a year to review the juries' menus. They are the ones who actually vote to determine the winner, requiring a simple majority to select one of the three nominated finalists. Because the Board is heavily weighted toward journalism executives, the arts and letters categories are often judged by professionals outside their immediate field.[1][3][6][7]

The Board's power does not stop at selecting from the menu. Under the rules of the prize, the Board possesses a sweeping veto authority. If the executives dislike all three of the jury's finalists, they can vote by simple majority to issue no award whatsoever. This is a nuclear option that the Board has deployed multiple times in the fiction and drama categories, effectively declaring that nothing published that year met their standards, regardless of what the expert jury concluded.[3][4][6]

Even more dramatically, the Board can bypass the jury entirely. With a 75 percent majority vote, the executives can reach outside the nominated finalists and select an entirely different entry. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations, the rules allow them to ask the prize administrator to consult with the jury chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries. This mechanism ensures that the Board is never forced to attach the Pulitzer name to a work they find objectionable.[3][6][7]

Historically, this veto power has been used as a strict moral and cultural filter. In 1921, the fiction jury voted for Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, a novel controversial for its satirical portrayal of small-town America. The highly conservative Board overturned the jury, awarding the prize instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. To justify the override, the Board temporarily changed the award criteria from presenting the whole atmosphere of American life to presenting the wholesome atmosphere of American life.[4]

Two decades later, the ideological clashes continued. In 1941, the fiction jury unanimously recommended Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Everyone involved was in favor of the book except for Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University and ex-officio chairman of the board. Butler vetoed the jurors' choice, deeming the novel offensive and profane, and reportedly stated that he hoped the jury would reconsider before asking the University to be associated with an award for a work of this nature. No fiction winner was named that year.[4]

The most infamous collision between expert consensus and executive veto occurred in 1974. The three-member fiction jury unanimously put forward Thomas Pynchon's sprawling, postmodern masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. The Board, however, balked at the recommendation. Private accounts from the board members at the time described the 760-page novel as unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene. Once again, the Board overruled the literary experts, and the 1974 fiction prize was left blank.[4]

These overrides highlight a structural clash built into the Pulitzer system. Juries are domain experts who evaluate works based on stylistic innovation, artistic merit, and peer consensus. The Board, however, evaluates works based on institutional risk, broad cultural acceptability, and the legacy of the prize itself. When a work is brilliant but abrasive, the jury sees a masterpiece, while the Board sees a liability.[7]

The tension is not purely historical. In 2010, the Board ignored the drama jury's recommendations to crown the rock musical Next to Normal, a surprise winner that bypassed the three nominated finalists. The move prompted the jury chair to publicly note that the Board had ignored the advice of its experts in favor of its own sentiments.[3]

Procedural anomalies continue to signal behind-the-scenes maneuvering. In 2025, the fiction prize went to Percival Everett's James in a year that mysteriously featured four finalists instead of the mandated three. Observers noted that this was a strong procedural signal that the Board either asked the jury for a fourth option or utilized its override powers to bypass the jury's original slate, ensuring the prize went to a novel that had already swept other major literary awards.[3]

The mechanics of the Pulitzer Prize reveal exactly what the award represents. It is not simply a measure of what the best writers or reporters think is the finest work of the year. It is a measure of what a specific, cautious institution is willing to permanently endorse. The two-step process ensures that while the avant-garde might win over the jury, only the culturally acceptable survives the Board.[7]