Loren Singer

Who is Loren Singer?

Loren Adelson Singer was an American novelist, best known for his 1970 political thriller, The Parallax View, which was made into a successful 1974 film, of the same name, starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn and William Daniels.

Singer was born in Buffalo, New York on March 5, 1923 and enlisted in the United States Army after he completed high school. He was sent to Yale University by the Office of Strategic Services to study the Malay language, but the war ended before he could serve in the field. While with the OSS, Singer learned the details of covert operations that became the theme of many of his novels. After the war ended, Singer earned an undergraduate degree in English from the Ohio State University in 1947.

He married Erma Rosenstadt in 1947, and the couple moved to New York City in the early 1950s. There Singer worked for his father-in-law's printing business while he wrote for such television programs as Kraft Television Theater, Studio One and Westinghouse Playhouse.

His 1970 book The Parallax View told the story of a reporter who follows the track of a series of witnesses who are found dead in the trail of the assassination of a presidential candidate, whose death had been attributed to a lone gunman. The book was written in 1970 at a time when questions still swirled over a series of political assassinations in the previous decade. The book allowed him to leave his job as a printing salesman working for his father-in-law and was the first movie that Doubleday pushed into film production. The film starred Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn and William Daniels.