Howard Koch is best known for his work on Casablanca (1943), which earned him and his collaborators, Julius and Philip Epstein, an Academy Award in 1944. That film bears the imprint of his style: skillful narrative construction and intelligent dialogue written from a liberal point of view. And though Koch brought these qualities to other films, Casablanca remains the high point of a career generally limited to respectable adaptations of minor works by prominent authors and topical melodramas in the characteristic Warner Bros. Manner--efficiently produced, fast-paced, hard-hitting stories full of incident. Blacklisted during the 1950s for his leftist politics, Koch has written only sporadically since 1961.

Koch was born in New York City but grew up in Kingston, New York, where his father, Frederick Koch, worked for the New York Board of Water Supply. Of French-German ancestry, the Kochs were outsiders in this provincial Hudson River Valley community dominated by old-line...