Alfred Hayes

Alfred Hayes (1911–1985) was an English-born American screenwriter, poet and novelist. His novels The Girl on the Via Flaminia and My Face for the World to See — spare, tender studies of love and the defeats of the American occupation of Italy — were hailed as among the finest American books of the post-war period.

Hayes wrote the celebrated film noir scripts for The Desperate Hours and Clash by Night, and his precise, melancholy voice carried from verse into cinema. In Rome after the war he was part of the golden generation of American expatriates around the Italian film renaissance, and his fiction remains valued for honest, aching discovery of the drowned past of ordinary lives.