Stephen Koch

Stephen Bayard Koch (May 8, 1941 – February 24, 2026) was an American novelist, essayist, historian, and teacher. He penned numerous books of cultural history, two novels, and a classic study of the work of Andy Warhol.

Koch taught creative writing at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Columbia University and Princeton University. He was also the author of a handbook for writers, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop.

Early life Koch was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on May 8, 1941, though he spent his childhood in Northfield, Minnesota. His father was a lawyer.

Literary career Dissatisfied with graduate school, Koch began to write reviews and literary essays which, in 1965, came to the attention of the then-rising literary star, Susan Sontag, and he became for the next several years, Sontag's protégé. He dropped graduate study, and his criticism was regularly published in magazines such as The New Republic, Partisan Review, The Nation, Tri-Quarterly, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. In 1966, he became an instructor in the department of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1969, he completed his first novel, Night Watch, which was published by Harper and Row to generally strong positive critical response both in print and the media.

In 1971, Koch became the writer and on-camera host of the ten-part PBS series on art: Eye-to-Eye. In the same year, he also wrote his book on the films of Andy Warhol, Stargazer, which has remained in print for over fifty years. After that, he became a regular contributor to various magazines, notably Harper's and Esquire, where during the first wave of feminism, he published a widely noticed essay "The Guilty Sex". His relation with Harper’s Magazine ended when the editor refused to publish his enthusiastic essay about Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’ avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

In 1977, despite his reluctance to become an academic, Koch became a fiction workshop leader at Columbia University’s MFA program in the School of the Arts. In 1978, he became an instructor in the undergraduate fiction writing program at Princeton University, where he continued to teach for seven years. He used his experience as a mentor to creative writers to produce the widely recognized handbook, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop. He remained at Columbia until 1991, by which time he had been, for several years, chairman of the program. A number of his former students at both universities have gone onto distinguished careers in literature and the theater.

In 1986, Koch published The Bachelor's Bride, a novel about the life and violent death of an art star of the 1960s and 70s. By a strange fluke, in the last interview given before his death, Andy Warhol mentioned that he wanted to make a movie based on this novel.

From the late 1980s into the mid-1990s, Koch wrote about twentieth century cultural history and wrote books of nonfiction: Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals and The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of Jose Robles. Later, because of his longstanding interest in the forces that led to German fascism and the Second World War, he published Hitler's Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust, the story of the obscure Jewish teenager in Paris whose assassination of a German diplomat was used by Adolf Hitler as a pretext for Kristallnacht, a turning point in the Nazis' persecution of the Jews and prelude to the Holocaust.

Personal life and death Koch was married twice: from 1960 to 1965 to Sheila Shulman; and to Frances Cohen, MD, from 1987 until her death in 2021. He had one daughter, Angelica Madeline Koch, born in 1994. Koch was bisexual and had significant liaisons with both men and women.

Stephen Koch died from a heart attack in Manhattan, New York City, on February 24, 2026, at the age of 84.

In 2017, a retrospective of Hujar's work, curated at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, travelled to major venues in the United States and Europe. By then, the critical consensus included Hujar among the great American photographers.