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WIKIPEDIA ON STEPHEN KOCH

Stephen Koch is a writer and teacher born (May 8. 1941) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He grew up in the college town of Northfield, Minnesota, the site of Carleton and Saint Olaf Colleges, where his father was a local lawyer.

EARLY LIFE Almost all of Koch’s childhood was spent in Northfield. Koch’s father, Robert Fulton Koch, died of complications of a rheumatic heart in 1951, when Stephen was ten. 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.

EDUCATION

During Koch’s education in Northfield’s public schools, theater and writing absorbed him. Pre-teen, puppetry was his obsession; later, he was active in school theatricals. He became determined to be a writer around the age of 10.

After high school, Koch enrolled in the University of Minnesota, where he was a student from June 1959 until June 1960. In the summer of 1960, he moved to New York with the woman who became his first wife, Sheila Helen Shulman. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the City College of New York in 1963, and in 1964 took an MA in English and briefly pursued doctoral studies at Columbia.

CAREER

Though he never desired an academic career, Koch was an instructor in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1965-1970. Yet in 1964, Koch began to write and publish literary essays and reviews, ignoring his academic work. When his writing came to the attention of Susan Sontag, he became her protege, and though Sontag his career was launched. His writing appeared prolifically for The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Esquire, and many other publications.

In 1970, Koch published his first novel, Night Watch, (Harper and Row, 1970). The novel was warmly reviewed in major publications in America, England, and Europe, and significant coverage in venues such as Life magazine and on PBS Television.

In 1972, Koch wrote and appeared as the on-camera host of Eye-To-Eye, a nationally broadcast PBS television series about art.

Immediately after completing Eye-to-Eye, Koch wrote Stargazer, a book about Andy Warhol, which has remained in print since its publication in 1973 and is  often cited as a critical  classic.

After publishing Stargazer, Koch continued to write prolifically on literature and art. Among his essays from this period are “The Spirit of Soho” (Esquire, April 1975), “The Guilty Sex: Men and Feminism” (Esquire, 1975);“Guilt, Grace and Robert Mapplethorpe” (Art in America, November 1986); The Secret Kafka” The New Criterion, January 1984, translated in French as “Kafka Secret” (L’Infini. Autumn 1985.)  “Caravaggio and the Unseen” (Antaeus, 1986).

In 1986, Koch published his second novel,The Bachelors’ Bride, about the life and death of a major artist of the sixties. By a strange quirk, shortly before his death in 1987, Warhol himself told an interviewer that he wanted to make a movie based on The Bachelors’ Bride.

In 1994, Koch published Double Lives, a study of Comintern propaganda.

In 2003, Koch consolidated his experience teaching writing in The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, (Random House).

In 2007, he published The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, the Murder of Jose Robles. (Counterpoint.)

His most recent book is Hitler’s Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust. (Counterpoint, 2019.)

All Koch’s books have been widely translated

TEACHING CAREER

Koch began teaching creative writing at Columbia University in 1977 and at Princeton University in 1978, continuing at Princeton until 1984, and at Columbia until 1995. Between 1988 and 1994, he served as chair of the graduate Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia. His students have included some of the most noteworthy young writers of two generations.

PERSONAL LIFE: Koch and Sheila Shulman were divorced in 1965. In 1987, he married Frances Cohen, a physician and psychiatrist. They have one daughter: Angelica Madeline Koch. Koch is bisexual and has had significant liaisons with both sexes.

PETER HUJAR: In 1987, when the photographer Peter Hujar died as a victim of the 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.”

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, and perhaps the greatest of his generation. BIBLIOGRAPHY