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Charles S. Singleton (1909–1985) was an American scholar, writer, and critic of literature. He was an expert on the work ofDante Alighieri, but also of Giovanni Boccaccio. He wrote An Essay on the Vita Nuova (1949), and the famous Dante Studies (I vol. in 1954).He studied, as did the German critic Erich Auerbach, the allegorical interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy, work which he also translated into English, in six volumes. Irma Brandeis was one of his disciples.
Singleton received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1936. From 1937 until his death, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, except from 1948 to 1957, when he filled the chair in Italian studies at Harvard.
Professor Singleton gave the lecture: "The Vistas in Retrospect" in 1965 at the Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi in Florence where he received the golden medal for Dante Studies whose other honorees include T. S. Eliot and André Pezard.