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.