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 ( now part of City University of New York ) , 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 ( the " morale division " ) . Afterwards , he stayed in Rome and became a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films . His experience in Allied-occupied Rome served as the basis for his first two novels . '' All Thy Conquests '' ( 1947 ) is an episodic novel that follows several Americans and Italians over the course of a day in September 1944 . 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 . 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
Fosse Ardeatine
Ardeatine massacre
Alfred Hayes (writer)