Alfred Hayes (18 April 1911 – 14 August 1985) was an American screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy as well as the United States.
The novel uses as its historical backdrop the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the botched trial of fascist Pietro Caruso that devolved into a lynching, shocking the entire world.
[3] His second novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), revisits the setting of Allied-occupied Rome, but focuses on a single, failed romance between the American officer, Robert, and the Italian, Lisa, whom he pays to play his wife.
His credits as a television scriptwriter included scripts for American series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Nero Wolfe and Mannix.
Decades after Hayes' death in August 1985, 3 of his novels, In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958), and The End of Me (1968) were given new editions under The New York Review of Books' Classics imprint.