In between acting and screenwriting, Young was variously employed in a tool firm, as a luggage salesman, a garbage collector and as a bartender for $60 a week (as a writer for Warners he had made ten times that amount!).
Won the Oscar for best screenplay (The Defiant Ones (1958)) under the pseudonymous Nathan E. Douglas after being blacklisted for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights while testifying before the 1953 House Committee on Un-American Activities.
In the late 1940s he was an actor under contract to Warner Brothers.