Alfred Hayes

Who was Alfred Hayes?

Alfred Hayes was a British screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy and the United States. He is perhaps best known for his poem "Joe Hill", later set to music by Earl Robinson.

Born in Whitechapel, London to a Jewish family that moved to the United States when he was three, Hayes graduated from New York's City College, worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, and began writing fiction and poetry in the 1930s. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army Special Services. Afterwards, he stayed in Rome and became a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films. As a co-writer on Roberto Rossellini's Paisan, he was nominated for an Academy Award; he received another Academy Award nomination for Teresa. He adapted his own novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia into a play; in 1953 it was adapted into a French-language film Un acte d'amour.

He was an uncredited co-writer of Vittorio De Sica's neorealist film Bicycle Thieves for which he also wrote the English language subtitles.

Among his U.S. filmwriting credits are The Lusty Men and the film adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars.