Background
Born in New York City, New York, Koch grew up in Kingston, New York and was a graduate of Saint Stephen"s College (later renamed Bard College) and Columbia Law School.
Born in New York City, New York, Koch grew up in Kingston, New York and was a graduate of Saint Stephen"s College (later renamed Bard College) and Columbia Law School.
Columbia University; Columbia Law School.
Writing for stage and radio
While practicing law in Hartsdale, New York, he began to write plays. Great Scott (1929), Give Us This Day (1933), and In Time to Come (1941) were produced on Broadway. His radio work in the 1930s as a writer for the Columbia Broadcasting System Mercury Theater of the Air included the Orson Welles radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938), which caused nationwide panic among some listeners for its documentary-like portrayal of an invasion of spaceships from Mars.
Koch later wrote a play about the panic, Invasion From Mars, which was later adapted into the 1975 television movie, The Night That Panicked America, in which actor Joshua Bryant plays Koch.
Screenwriting and blacklisting
Koch began writing for Hollywood studios. His first accepted screenplay was made into a 1940 film.
He also wrote Shining Victory (1941), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), his favorite screenplay. In 1943, at the request of Jack L. Warner of Warner Brothers, Koch wrote the screenplay for Mission to Moscow (1943).
The movie subsequently spawned controversy because of its positive portrayal of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.
After the war, Koch was fired by Jack Warner after Koch was denounced as a Communist. Koch was blacklisted by Hollywood in 1951. After being blacklisted, Koch moved with his family to Europe and eventually took up residence in the United Kingdom with other blacklisted writers where he wrote for five years for film and television under the pseudonyms "Peter Howard" and "Anne Rodney".
In 1956, he returned to the United States and settled in Woodstock, New York, where he continued to write plays and books and remained actively committed to progressive political and social justice causes.
Howard Koch died in 1995 in Kingston, New New York
He was then criticized by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his outspoken leftist political views.