Short answers, pulled from the story.
Charles Rosen was born in New York City on the 5th of May 1927. He grew up in Washington Heights before his family moved to a less fashionable home on the Upper West Side during the Great Depression.
Charles Rosen graduated from Princeton University in 1947 with a degree in French literature. He completed his PhD dissertation on Jean de La Fontaine poetry under E.B.O. Borgerhoff by 1951.
Charles Rosen published The Classical Style in 1971 which won a National Book Award for Arts and Letters. He followed this with Sonata Forms in 1980, The Romantic Generation in 1995, A Short Companion to Beethoven's Piano Sonatas in 2001, and Critical Entertainments.
Charles Rosen began writing notes himself after feeling unhappy with the printed sleeve note describing his first Chopin recording released in 1960. A publisher offered to print whatever he wished without restriction leading him to contribute columns to The New York Review of Books starting in 1970.
President Obama awarded Charles Rosen a National Humanities Medal on the 13th of February 2012 during a ceremony held in the East Room of the White House.