Alfred Hayes; Author of Labor’s Rallying Cry

Alfred Hayes, screenwriter, novelist and poet whose poem “Joe Hill” became a rallying cry for labor when it was made a ballad in the 1940s, has died of meningitis at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital.

Hayes, whose most popular novel, “The Girl on the Via Flaminia,” became an off-Broadway play and movie, was 74 when he died Wednesday.

Born in London and raised in New York, he wrote his first novel, “All Thy Conquests,” after wartime service in Italy. In 1949 he wrote “Flaminia,” a story about an American soldier’s involvement with a Roman woman.

Hayes stayed in Italy after the war and contributed to the scripts of the realistic films that proved immensely popular around the world, among them Roberto Rossellini’s “Paisan” and Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thief.”

Academy Award Nomination

In Hollywood he wrote the script for “Teresa,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1951, and “Island in the Sun,” “A Hatful of Rain” and “The Left Hand of God.”

His later novels included “In Love,” “My Face for the World to See” and “The End of Me.”

In 1961 he published a trio of novellas, “The Temptation of Don Volpi,” which won praise from Robert Kirsch, late book critic of the Los Angeles Times. He called Hayes “a master of short fiction” whose “sketches suggest an echoing death, written with poetry and precision.”

“Joe Hill” was a poem Hayes had written about the execution in 1915 of an organizer for the International Workers of the World. Put to music by Earl Robinson, it has been recorded by a succession of folk singers and sung on picket lines and at union meetings across America.

Prestigious Prize

In 1952 Hayes was one of six writers honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters at its annual ceremony in New York. The $5,000 prize is considered among the most prestigious in American letters.

Hayes is survived by his wife, Marietta; two sons, Alfred Eliot and Alan; a daughter, Josephine Hayes Dean, two brothers and two grandchildren.

A funeral service was held Friday at Valhalla Memorial Park and Mortuary in North Hollywood.