The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#51
Annie Proulx
#4876
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. Her second novel, The Shipping News , won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.
Go to Profile#52
Shoshana Felman
#3701
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.
Go to Profile#53
Sandra Gilbert
#5830
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sandra M. Gilbert is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic . Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#54
Simin Daneshvar
#6215
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Simin Dāneshvar was an Iranian academic, novelist, fiction writer, and translator. She was largely regarded as the first major Iranian woman novelist. Her books dealt with the lives of ordinary Iranians, especially those of women, and through the lens of recent political and social events in Iran at the time. Daneshvar had a number of firsts to her credit; in 1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun , which went on to become a bestseller. Daneshvar's Playhouse, a collection of five sto...
Go to Profile#55
Anne Waldman
#5400
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.
Go to Profile#56
Herta Müller
#3908
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf , Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
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Beverly Cleary
#6659
Overall Influence
1916 - 2021 (105 years)
Beverly Atlee Cleary was an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.
Go to Profile#58
Oksana Zabuzhko
#6850
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Oksana Stefanivna Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works have been translated into several languages. Life Born 19 September 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine. The writer's father, Stefan Ivanovych Zabuzhko was a teacher, literary critic, and translator, the first to translate the stories of the Czech composer and writer Ilja Hurník into Ukrainian, and was repressed during Stalin's regime.
Go to Profile#59
Muriel Spark
#5293
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Life Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud . Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls , where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith. In 1934–35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a ...
Go to Profile#60
Janet Todd
#4872
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Janet Margaret Todd is a British academic and author. She was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. Much of her work concerns Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and their circles.
Go to Profile#61
Linda Hutcheon
#5721
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, O.C. is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.
Go to Profile#62
Marjorie Perloff
#4538
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States. Early life Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese anti-Semitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York. After attending Oberlin College from 1949 to 1952, she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1953; that year, she married Joseph K. Perloff, a cardiologist focused on congenital heart disease.
Go to Profile#63
Mary Oliver
#7532
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Go to Profile#64
Denise Levertov
#3901
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an "enemy alien" by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistak...
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Barbara Smith
#3557
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation....
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Marilyn French
#2181
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Marilyn French was an American radical feminist author, most widely known for her second book and first novel, the 1977 work The Women's Room. Life French was born in Brooklyn to E. Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department store clerk. In her youth, she was a journalist, writing a neighborhood newsletter. She played the piano and dreamed of becoming a composer. She received a bachelor's degree from Hofstra University in 1951, in philosophy and English literature. Marilyn Edwards married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950 and supported him while he attended law school. The couple had two children.
Go to Profile#67
Sonia Sanchez
#4857
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, includ...
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Alison Lurie
#5178
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Alison Stewart Lurie was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
Go to Profile#69
Terri Windling
#8566
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
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Jane Chance
#9538
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jane Chance , also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.
Go to Profile#71
Sara Danius
#6243
Overall Influence
1962 - 2019 (57 years)
Sara Maria Danius was a Swedish literary critic and philosopher, and a scholar of literature and aesthetics. Danius was professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, docent of literature at Uppsala University and professor in literary science at Stockholm University.
Go to Profile#72
Edwidge Danticat
#4498
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#73
Lydia Davis
#5126
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Go to Profile#74
Cherríe Moraga
#3146
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena, which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
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Barbara Kingsolver
#3279
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Go to Profile#76
Rebecca Solnit
#5070
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Early life and education Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. In 1966, her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female was hated," she has said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests.
Go to Profile#77
Francine Prose
#6075
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a visiting professor of literature at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center. Life and career Born in Brooklyn, Prose graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991. Prose's novel The Glorious Ones has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.
Go to Profile#78
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#3241
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors" of Nigerian fiction who are attracting a wider audience, particularly in her second home, the United States.
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Patricia Highsmith
#5115
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene.
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Maxine Hong Kingston
#6953
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Maxine Hong Kingston is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
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Mary Lefkowitz
#3519
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American scholar of Classics. She is the Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she previously worked from 1959 to 2005. She has published ten books over the course of her career.
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Rosario Ferré
#7254
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Rosario Ferré Ramírez de Arellano was a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferré, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972.
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Oriana Fallaci
#747
Overall Influence
1929 - 2006 (77 years)
Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist and author. A partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
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Jeanette Winterson
#5404
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jeanette Winterson is an English author. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of t...
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Claire Messud
#10562
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children . Early life Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, Messud grew up in the United States, Australia, and Canada, returning to the United States as a teenager. Messud's mother is Canadian, and her father is a Pied-noir from French Algeria. She was educated at the University of Toronto Schools and Milton Academy. She did undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale University and Cambridge University, where she met her spouse James Wood.
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Louise Erdrich
#6564
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
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Jackie Kay
#7906
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jacqueline Margaret Kay, , is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers , Trumpet and Red Dust Road . Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Go to Profile#88
Fay Weldon
#3827
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Fay Weldon was an English author, essayist and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball , The Cloning of Joanna May , Wicked Women and The Bulgari Connection , but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil which was televised by the BBC in 1986.
Go to Profile#89
Amy Tan
#5778
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Amy Ruth Tan is an American author of Chinese heritage, best known for the novel The Joy Luck Club , which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.
Go to Profile#90
Paule Marshall
#6154
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant. Life and career Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke on April 9, 1929. Marshall's father had migrated from the Caribbean island of Barbados to New York in 1919 and, during her childhood, deserted the family to join a quasi-religious cult, leaving his wife to raise their children by herself. Marshall wrote about how her career was inspired by observ...
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Ana Lydia Vega
#8724
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ana Lydia Vega is a Puerto Rican writer. Biography Her parents were Virgilio Vega, an "oral poet" from Coamo, Puerto Rico, and Doña María Santana, a teacher from the town of Arroyo. She went to school at the Academia del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce, and studied at the University of Puerto Rico, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1968. She went on to study at the University of Provence, France, receiving a master's degree in French literature in 1971, and a doctorate in French literature in 1978. She has received the Premio Casa de las Américas and the Premio Juan Rulfo . In 1985 she was selected as the "Author of the Year" by the Puerto Rico Society of Authors.
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Jamaica Kincaid
#7389
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua . She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
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Susan Bassnett
#6829
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Susan Edna Bassnett, is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. As of 2016, she is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Madeleine L'Engle
#5572
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science.
Go to Profile#95
Judy Blume
#7793
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 25 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. , Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing , Deenie , and Blubber . Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Go to Profile#96
Julia Donaldson
#5958
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Julia Catherine Donaldson is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her...
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Barbara Johnson
#6007
Overall Influence
1947 - 2009 (62 years)
Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanianian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France.
Go to Profile#98
Arundhati Roy
#2015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
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Marilynne Robinson
#3892
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
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Betty T. Bennett
#10396
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Betty T. Bennett was Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. She was previously Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and acting provost of Pratt Institute from 1979 to 1985. Among her numerous awards and honors, Bennett was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and fellow of American Council of Learned Societies. She won the Keats-Shelley Association of America - Distinguished Scholar Award in 1992 and was Founding President, Phi Beta Kappa, Zeta Chapter at American University. Born in Brooklyn, New...
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