Robert Kotlowitz, a novelist and editor who reluctantly became a public television executive in 1971 and went on to help shape a lineup of homegrown and imported shows — including “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” “Live at the Met,” “Dance in America” and “Brideshead Revisited” — that represent a high-water mark in American television, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.


The cause was prostate cancer, his son Alex said.


Mr. Kotlowitz had just quit as managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, in a battle with its new owners over editorial control, when John Jay Iselin, the newly appointed president of the nation’s largest public television station, Channel 13 in New York, offered him work.


“As what? I have never been in a television studio,” Mr. Kotlowitz recalled asking in a Channel 13 interview. Mr. Iselin, he said, replied, “You’re going to be editorial director.”


“Of what?” Mr. Kotlowitz asked, dubiously.


“We will see,” Mr. Iselin replied.


Mr. Kotlowitz, who was senior vice president for programming and broadcasting and who remained at Channel 13 until retiring in 1990, became known as a sort of in-house minister of culture and the most ardent advocate for some of Mr. Iselin’s most ambitious decisions. He first proposed a half-hour evening news show featuring Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil in 1973, after the pair had anchored public television coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.


The deal proved complicated, but largely thanks to Mr. Kotlowitz’s persistence it came together two years later as “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” The program, which has been seen nationally since December 1975, is known now as “PBS NewsHour.”


In 1981, when Channel 13 was having financial troubles, Mr. Kotlowitz persuaded Mr. Iselin to invest $500,000 in a series being produced by Granada Television in England. The series, “Brideshead Revisited,” based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel, became one of public television’s greatest successes. Mr. Kotlowitz played a similar role in introducing audiences to “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” live performances of New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, “Bill Moyers Journal” and “Nature.”


Mr. MacNeil, who became a friend, said Mr. Kotlowitz’s aesthetic sensibility deeply influenced PBS programming. “He had innately good taste, and a deep familiarity with literature and art in every form,” Mr. MacNeil said in an interview. Before the advent of cable, when public television was one of the only alternatives to network fare in many small towns, he added, “Bob was the one who brought people opera, ballet, the New York Philharmonic.”


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).


In a Washington Post Book World review of “Somewhere Else,” Michele Murray compared Mr. Kotlowitz to Isaac Bashevis Singer. “He has done better than Singer did in ‘The Manor’ and ‘The Estate, ” she wrote, “in telling what is essentially the same story of the breakup of the traditional shtetl life of the isolated Jewish communities in Poland.”


In addition to his son Alex, Mr. Kotlowitz’s survivors include another son, Dan; a sister, Elaine Magarill; and four grandchildren. His wife, Billie Leibowitz Kotlowitz, died in 1994.


Mr. Kotlowitz told interviewers that while he had not been looking for a job in public television, he was glad that one came along. The job, he said in the Channel 13 interview, brought him into the arena of all his life’s great pleasures: music, art, books, nature, history, current events.


He added, “It was the world.”