Alfred Hayes was born in 1911. He graduated from the City College of New York, then worked briefly as a newspaper reporter for the The Daily News and the New York American. He began writing poetry and fiction in the 30s and his first book of poems, The Big Time, was published in 1944. During WWII he served in the U.S. Army Special Services (the "morale division"). Afterwards he remained in Italy and worked as a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films. As a co-writer on Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946), he was nominated for an Academy Award; he received another Academy Award nomination for Teresa (1951) as the co-writer of the original story of Fred Zinnemann's Teresa. He adapted his own novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia into a play, and in 1953 it was adapted into a French-language film Un acte d'amour.
Hayes was the uncredited co-writer of Vittorio De Sica's film The Bicycle Thief (1948) for which he also wrote the English subtitles.
Among his U.S. filmwriting credits are The Lusty Men (1952), Human Desire (1954), The Left Hand of God (1955), Island in the Sun (1957), and the film adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars (1974). He was also a TV scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Mannix.
He also wrote the poem "Joe Hill," set to music by Earl Robinson and popularized by Joan Baez, about the labor organizer who was executed in Utah in 1915.
His published books of poetry and fiction include The Big Time (poetry), Welcome to the Castle (poetry), All Thy Conquests (novel), The Girl on the Via Flaminia (novel), The Shadow of Heaven (novel), In Love (novel), and My Face for the World to See (novel).
Alfred Hayes died in 1985.
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AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
I had thought (being older) the errors I had made
at twenty
not being twenty I would not make again
thinking I had learned at last how one lives among men
without flaying them or being myself flayed
Assuming that with time and these changes I had learned
finally
enough of myself and what it is I must avoid
to escape when the destruction became general the being destroyed
and while not burning them not to be myself burned
But where I thought a natural peace would intervene
between natural enemies
at thirty-five I find new wars erupt
and I am what I was at twenty -- intolerant, abrupt
and ridden by the same passions and shaken by the same spleen
And still as when I longed to hurl the poor upon the rich,
the ugly
on the handsome, the venomous on the smug,
unextinguished hatreds rise up to ruin my acquired shrug
and near my mouth the old familiar muscle starts to twitch.
-- Alfred Hayes
(from Welcome to the Castle, 1950)
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