Live with lightning, a novel

Wilson became a professional writer in the 1940s while he was a research scientist, instructor, and doctoral candidate in Physics at Columbus University. Science, invention, and the ethical problems of modern atomic science are the subjects for some of his works. Finding his double-life too strenuous, he left academia and moved to Martha's Vineyard to become a full-time writer. He also wrote non-fiction on scientific matters for the general reader. In 1953, at the height of the cold war, he learned that his novel Live with Lightning had been translated into Russian and was selling well. In the Soviet Union and he was considered a major novelist, while in his native United States his was less widely heard-of. At the start of his career, he collaborated on a mystery novel "The Goose is Cooked" with Abraham Polonsky written under the joint pseudonym of Emmett Grogan. At his death, he was married to Stella Adler, the famous acting coach.