Alfred Hayes (1911–1985) was an American journalist, poet, screenwriter, and novelist. Having served in Italy during World War II, he stayed on to co-write several classic Italian neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, as well as to gather material for his two most popular novels, All Thy Conquests and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (the basis for the 1953 film Act of Love, starring Kirk Douglas). In the late 1940s he went to work in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, RKO, and Twentieth Century-Fox, where his screenplays included Clash by Night, A Hatful of Rain, The Left Hand of God, and Joy in the Morning. His later novels included In Love, My Face for the World to See, and The End of Me.
Books
In Love
If Indecent Proposal had been written by Jean Rhys and shot by Edward Hopper, the result might have been something like In Love, in which lonely, searching strangers strive to make connections that will outlive last call at the local dive. “Hayes addresses the human condition and its heartbreaks with brevity and brutal honesty.”—The Guardian
My Face for the World to See
In Hayes’s hypnotically intense reckoning with self-deception and desolation, a disillusioned screenwriter falls into an affair with an actress who, like him, has missed the big time. Nelson Algren called My Face for the World to See “the most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust.”