Mark Singer, who spent more than half a century at The New Yorker turning the lives of offbeat, complicated, and quintessentially American characters into richly observed prose, died on June 19, 2026, in Manhattan. He was 75.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on October 19, 1950, Singer was the son of Alexander and Marjorie Singer. He carried his home state with him throughout his career, and Oklahoma would later become the setting for one of his most memorable books. After studying English at Yale, where he graduated in 1972 under the guidance of the writer William Zinsser, he found his way to the magazine that would define his working life.

Singer joined The New Yorker in 1974 when he was just 23, an unusually young arrival to a masthead built on patience and craft. He grew into a writer of Talk of the Town items and far-flung U.S. Journal dispatches, but it was the profile that became his signature form. He had a gift for sitting with people long enough that their contradictions surfaced on their own, and according to the Philadelphia Inquirer his editor David Remnick placed him squarely in the magazine's reporting lineage, saying he came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and Calvin Trillin.

Several of his magazine pieces grew into books. In 1985 he published Funny Money, an account of the collapse of Oklahoma City's Penn Square Bank, where a small institution had inflated its balance sheet during an energy boom under a cast of executives so vivid that one of them turned up to work wearing Mickey Mouse ears. His 1993 portrait of the illusionist and scholar Ricky Jay remains among his most admired work, later anthologized in a collection of New Yorker profiles, and he is credited with helping arrange the introduction that led to a documentary about Jay years afterward.

Perhaps the assignment that followed him longest was his profile of Donald Trump, undertaken in the 1990s for then-editor Tina Brown. Singer trailed his subject across construction sites, through the Trump Tower office, and onto a private plane, and distilled the experience into a line that readers have quoted ever since: a description, per Editor & Publisher, of a man who had achieved an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. In 2016 he expanded that reporting into the book Trump and Me.

His other books, including the National Magazine Award finalist Citizen K and the profile collections Mr. Personality, Somewhere in America, and Character Studies, traced a steady fascination with the curiously obsessed. Critics returned again and again to the quality of his voice. One reviewer in The New York Times Book Review described it as cool and intelligent, with a wry and artful skepticism uncorrupted by cynicism. His work earned a Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1985 and, in 2001, a place in the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

Singer is survived by his partner, Lisa Brody, his children Tim, Jeb, Reid, and Paul Mailhot-Singer, his siblings, and two grandchildren.

Mark Singer leaves behind a body of work that quietly insisted ordinary Americans were worth a closer look. He found drama not in the famous so much as in the eccentric and the overlooked, and he wrote about them with patience, humor, and an ear tuned to the way people actually talk. Generations of magazine readers came to know the country a little better through his eyes, and the writers who follow him will continue to study how he did it: with curiosity that never curdled, and with a belief that every life, examined closely enough, tells a story worth keeping.