Robert Kotlowitz

Robert Kotlowitz (November 21, 1924 - August 25, 2012) was a television producer, documentary filmmaker, and writer. His 1972 novel Somewhere Else won the National Jewish Book Award. While a producer at WNET/THIRTEEN, he helped created a number of influential shows such as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (later renamed PBS NewsHour) and Live at the Met, with the shows called "a high-water mark in American television."

Life Kotlowitz was born in 1924, in Madison, New Jersey. He was brought up in Baltimore. He was the son of Max and Debra Kotlowitz.

Kotlowitz served in the Lorraine Campaign and was part of an ill-fated American assault against German troops in France in October 1944, which he described in a 1995 article in The New York Times Magazine and in Before Their Time: A Memoir, published in 1999. In the book he tells the story of the massacre of his 46-man platoon, where he was one of only three survivors, and the only survivor who was not wounded.

After the war, Kotlowitz studied at Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. He later worked as a managing editor of Harper's Magazine, being on the magazine's staff from 1959 to 1971, and as a television producer and senior vice president at WNET/THIRTEEN.

While at WNET/THIRTEEN, Kotlowitz helped create a number of influential shows such as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (later renamed PBS NewsHour), Live at the Met, Dance in America and Brideshead Revisited. The Boardwalk (1977) Sea Changes (1986) His Master’s Voice (1992) Before Their Time: A Memoir (1999), a memoir of his war years.