 "Hayes couldn't get a job the whole time I was blacklisted," he claimed.Hays spent the blacklist years rooming with the family of fellow blacklist victim Earl Robinson (composer of "The House I Live In", "Ballad for Americans", and "Joe Hill"), in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.He wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the U.S. and Britain.