Oliver Crawford was just embarking on a career as a Hollywood writer and had secured a contract to work with Burt Lancaster when he fell victim to the anti-communist blacklist in the early 1950s and suddenly found himself designing window displays in New York to earn a living.

But Crawford was one of the few who managed to escape the shadow of the blacklist and revive his career. He went on to become a prominent and prolific writer for American television in the 1960s and 1970s, working on such popular series as The Fugitive (1963-67), The Outer Limits (1964), Bonanza (1960 and 1967), The Bionic Woman (1976) and Kojak (1977).

He was particularly revered among Star Trek fans for having written three episodes of the original series. He wrote The Galileo Seven (1967), one of the episodes in the first season, in which the crew of the USS Enterprise’s shuttle Galileo are attacked by spear-bearing humanoids when they land on an unfamiliar planet and leave the safety of the ship. For all Star Trek’s originality, Crawford admitted he borrowed that storyline from an obscure Lucille Ball drama about a plane crash, called Five Came Back (1939).

Crawford was one of the writers on the third season episodes The Cloud Minders and Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (both 1969). Star Trek often tackled social issues in a sci-fi setting and The Cloud Minders was set on a world of strict class division, where miners revolt against their conditions.

Star Trek famously flopped on initial transmission and NBC bosses took a lot of persuading to keep it going for three series before cancelling it. It picked up converts when stations began showing repeats in the early 1970s, acquired a new audience on video (and subsequently DVD) and became a genuine social phenomenon. It has been argued that it is the single most successful TV series, spawning feature films, several spin-off TV series and all sorts of books, comics and other merchandise, and influencing social attitudes and everyday language.

Philip Kaufman Crawford was born in Chicago in 1917, and studied at the Goodman Theatre school, where contemporaries included Karl Malden and Sam Wanamaker, who moved to the UK when he was blacklisted.

He wrote initially for television, though a story he had co-written formed the basis of the Budd Boetticher western The Man from the Alamo (1953), starring Glenn Ford. But the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts were gathering momentum at the time and Crawford was blacklisted when he refused to name names of those involved in left-wing activities.

By the late 1950s, however, he had managed to revive his career, with the help of others in the industry, and was writing for The Restless Gun (1958) and Lawman (1959).

He was highly active in the Writers Guild of America, was part of the negotiating team during the writers’ strike of 1960 and a board member for more than 25 years. He campaigned for financial restitution for victims of the blacklist and for the abolition of the guild’s anti-communist loyalty oath.

He said: “Two hundred writers were blacklisted from 1953 to 1957. Of them, only 10 per cent were able to recover their careers and I was always grateful to be among them . . . I like to think that any situation you’re involved with during the course of your life equips you to become a better person and, in my case, a better writer.”

He wrote a novel, The Execution (1978), about survivors of a Nazi concentration camp who recognise a doctor who carried out experiments on them and decide to mete out their own justice. He adapted it as a TV movie in 1985, starring Loretta Swit, Valerie Harper and Rip Torn.

His wife predeceased him and he is survived by three children.

Oliver Crawford, writer, was born on August 12, 1917. He died on September 24, 2008, aged 91