Michael Wilson was one of the many Hollywood screenwriters who was denied work and banished from Hollywood in the 1950s because of his supposed Communist beliefs. Wilson himself considered his scripts to be "humanistic" rather than Communistic; he saw himself as a screenwriter who honestly portrayed the human condition and let the viewers infer what they wished. Shortly before his death in 1978 he told Take One magazine: "I tend to feel that didactic or agit-prop approach to the whole art form is an incorrect one for progressives....If the aim is primarily to change people, the film artist or creator is better off simply depicting honestly the way things are rather than beating people over the head with his own point of view in a propagandistic way."

Wilson was born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He graduated from the University of California in 1936 and won a grant to study in...