Stephen Koch (writer)

Stephen Koch
Born	(1941-05-08) May 8, 1941 (age 82) Saint Paul, Minnesota
Education	University of Minnesota, City College of New York, Columbia University
Years active	1964–present
Spouse	Frances Cohen
Children	1

Stephen Koch (born May 8, 1941) is a novelist, essayist, historian and teacher. He has written numerous books of cultural history, two novels, and a classic study of the work of Andy Warhol. He has taught creative writing at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Columbia University and Princeton University. He is also the author of a handbook for writers, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop.

Early life

Koch was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota,^[1] though he spent his childhood in Northfield, Minnesota, a college town (Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges), where his father was a local lawyer. His father died in 1951, when Koch was ten, and he grew up in a middle-class home with his mother, Edith Koch; his brother, the physicist Frederick Koch, and his maternal grandmother, Emma Pilling Bayard, a classic daughter of midwestern pioneers, who died at an advanced age when Koch was 16.

After attendance in the local schools, where he his prime enthusiasm was the theater, Koch entered the University of Minnesota, studying comparative literature. After one year, he moved to New York City, where he had dreamt of living since childhood. He earned his living in various menial positions at the New York Public Library, and more glamorously, as an assistant to the managing clerk of the prominent white-shoe law firm, Lord, Day, and Lord.

In 1960, Koch married for the first time, and in 1963 earned his BA at the City College of New York. At City College, he studied literature, not because he wished to become an academic, but because he hoped knowledge of literature would serve his ambition to be a writer. At City College, he was awarded what he still regards as the greatest honor of his life, when he was named the most promising future law student in his graduating class. Nonetheless, because of his primary vocation to be a writer, he decided against law school, and instead pursued graduate studies at Columbia University.^[2]

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,

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 60s 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.

In the late 1980s into the mid-1990s, Koch wrote about twentieth century cultural history and wrote books of nonfiction: Double Lives:

Personal life

Koch has been married twice: from 1960 to 1965, Sheila Shulman and from 1987 to the present, Frances Cohen, MD. Frances Cohen passed away 2021. He has one daughter, Angelica Madeline Koch, born in 1994. Koch is bisexual and has had significant liaisons with both men and women.

Peter Hujar

In 1987, when the photographer

AIDS pandemic, he named Koch as the executor of his entire artistic estate. Since then, Koch has worked to usher Hujar's work out of an esoteric cult following into what he regards as its rightful prominence in twentieth century art. In Harper's Magazine, April 2018, Koch published an essay describing these efforts: "The Pictures".^[7][8][9]

In 2017, a retrospective of Hujar's work, curated at the

Morgan Library in New York, travelled to major venues in Europe and the United States. By then, the critical consensus numbered Hujar among the great American photographers.^[10][11]

Bibliography

Books:

• Hitler's Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust San Francisco, Counterpoint Books. 2019.^[12]
• The Breaking Point:
  Robson Books
  , 2006). Translations: [Adieu a l’Amitie, Hemingway, Dos Passos et la Guerre d’Espagne. Paris, Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2005; La Ruptura: Hemingway, Dos Passos, y el Asesinato de Jose Robles. Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg: Circolo des Lectores. 2006.
• Double Lives:
  Stalin, Willi Münzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals. New York, Enigma Books, 2004. (Fully revised and updated edition)^[13]
• The Modern Library Writer's Workshop. New York,
  The Modern Library and Random House, 2003.^[14]
• The Bachelor's Bride. New York and London, Marion Boyars Inc., 1986. Translations: La Mariée des Célibataires. Paris: Stock, 1988; De Vrijgezellenbruid. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1988; La Novia de los solteros. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1989.[15]
• Andy Warhol: Photographs. New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1986.
• Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films. New York,
  Calder and Boyars
  , 1974. Second Revised and Expanded USA and UK Edition in 1985 by Marion Boyars. Third USA and UK Edition in 1990, revised with a new introductory chapter). Translations: Hyperstar. Paris: Éditions du Chêne.
• Night Watch. New York, Harper and Row, 1970. (Second printing by Calder and Boyers, 1971. Paperback by Harper and Row, 1973; Trade, 1975). Translations: Les Yeux de la Nuit. Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1971; Nachtwacke. Amsterdam: Mullenhof, 1973; Guardia Nocturna. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1980.

Essays:

• "Guilt, Grace and Robert Mapplethorpe" (Art in America, November 1986).
• "Caravaggio and the Unseen" (Antaeus, 1986).
• "The Secret Kafka" (The New Criterion, January 1984), translated into French as "Kafka Secret" (L'Infini, Autumn 1985).
• "The Spirit of Soho" (Esquire, April 1975).
• "The Guilty Sex: Man and Feminism" (Esquire, 1975).

References

1. ISSN 0099-9660
   . Retrieved 2022-10-14.
2. ^ "Koch, Stephen 1941- | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
3. ^ "Stephen Koch | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News". WNYC. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
4. ^ The Paley Center for Media https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=lawrence&p=36&item=T:11627
5. ^ Leifheit, Matthew (2013-10-15). "Stephen Koch on Peter Hujar: "If you're Vincent, you've got to have your Theo."". Art F City. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
6. ^ "'Stephen Koch' interviewed by Derek Alger". Pif Magazine. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
7. ISSN 0017-789X
   . Retrieved 2022-10-14.
8. ^ "The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar". The New Yorker. 2018-01-29. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
9. ISSN 0362-4331
   . Retrieved 2022-10-14.
10. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2022-10-14.
11. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2022-10-14.
12. ^ Magazine, Smithsonian; Boissoneault, Lorraine. "How a Jewish Teenager Went From Refugee to Assassin to Puppet of Nazi Propaganda". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
13. ^ "Stephen Koch". New York Review Books. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
14. ^ "Stephen Koch". Counterpoint Press. 2015-10-05. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
15. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2022-10-14.

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