Harriet Frank Jr., who collaborated with her husband, Irving Ravetch, on provocative screenplays that explored the social conflicts and moral questions of postwar American life in movies like “Hud” and “Norma Rae,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

Her death was announced by Michael Frank, her nephew.

To film industry peers and moviegoers who paid attention to the credits, the wife-and-husband team of Ms. Frank and Mr. Ravetch, who died in 2010, stood out among Hollywood’s most successful and literate script writers. The two generated 16 screenplays from 1958 to 1990, many inspired by the works of William Faulkner, William Inge, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and other best-selling authors.

Ms. Frank and Mr. Ravetch dramatized the charms of a brawling, arrogant Texas rogue (Paul Newman) in “Hud” (1963); the struggles of a teacher (Jon Voight) against the effects of poverty and racism on black children in a South Carolina island school in “Conrack” (1974); and the union fight of a worker (Sally Field) against labor injustices in a North Carolina cotton mill in “Norma Rae” (1979).

“Salvation is not an abstract concept — it’s a three-year contract,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review of “Norma Rae” in The New York Times. “These are sentiments that Martin Ritt, the director, and Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., his screenwriters, understand and fervently evoke in their often stirring new film.”