Charles Southward Singleton (1909–1985) was an American scholar, writer, and critic of literature. He was an expert on the work of Dante Alighieri and

Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio (, , ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was somet ...

. He wrote ''An Essay on the Vita Nuova'' (1949) and ''Dante Studies'' (I vol. in 1954). He studied, as did the German critic Erich Auerbach, the allegorical interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy, a work which he also translated into English in six volumes.

Irma Brandeis Irma Brandeis (1905–1990) was an American scholar of Dante Alighieri. Her work ''The Ladder of Vision'' was acclaimed as a breakthrough in Dantean studies upon its publication in the 1960s. Brandeis graduated from Barnard College in 1926. In he ...

was one of his disciples. Singleton earned his associated bachelor's from the University of Missouri in 1931 and went on to receive 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 Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. In 1950, Singleton was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1962. He 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.

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*Singleton's death i
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Associated Press
1909 births 1985 deaths American literary critics 20th-century American essayists Italian–English translators Translators of Dante Alighieri Dante scholars Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America 20th-century translators {{US-essayist-stub Members of the American Philosophical Society