Mr. Kotlowitz was born on Nov. 21, 1924, in Madison, N.J., and raised in Baltimore, where his parents, Max and Debra Kotlowitz, moved when he was a child. His father was a cantor.
Among the last cohort drafted in World War II, Mr. Kotlowitz was part of an ill-fated American assault against German troops in France after D-Day, which he described in a 1995 article in The New York Times Magazine and in “Before Their Time: A Memoir,” published in 1999.
“In this engagement, which lasted 12 hours,” he wrote in The Times, “all but three men in the third platoon, Company C, 104th Regiment, were lost. I was one of the survivors.”
After the war, Mr. Kotlowitz graduated from Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where he studied piano. Instead of becoming a concert pianist, though, he decided to write novels. That did not become his full-time work either — he worked as an editor at Discovery magazine, a publicity manager for RCA Victor Records, and a contributor and editor at Harper’s and other magazines before joining Channel 13 — but he did publish four novels: “Somewhere Else” (1972), “The Boardwalk,” (1977), “Sea Changes” (1986) and “His Master’s Voice” (1992).