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,
#251
Françoise Sagan
#7959
Overall Influence
1935 - 2004 (69 years)
Françoise Sagan was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known novel was her first – Bonjour Tristesse – which was written when she was a teenager.
Go to Profile#252
Jean Craighead George
#24420
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Jean Carolyn Craighead George was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves and Newbery runner-up My Side of the Mountain. Common themes in George's works are the environment and the natural world. Beside children's fiction, she wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and one autobiography published 30 years before her death, Journey Inward.
Go to Profile#253
Nobuko Takagi
#34561
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Nobuko Takagi is the professional name of Nobuko Tsuruta, a Japanese author. She has won the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, she has been named a Person of Cultural Merit, and her work has been adapted for film.
Go to Profile#254
Ruth Klüger
#19829
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Ruth Klüger was Professor Emerita of German Studies at the University of California, Irvine and a Holocaust survivor. She was the author of the bestseller about her childhood in Vienna and in Nazi concentration camps.
Go to Profile#255
Timberlake Wertenbaker
#10560
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Timberlake Wertenbaker is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator who has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others. She has been described in The Washington Post as "the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s".
Go to Profile#256
AnaLouise Keating
#14027
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
AnaLouise Keating is an American academic who is professor of Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. She is also the director of the department's PhD program. Keating's multiple books, essays, and edited collections primarily focus on transformation studies, U.S. women-of-color theories, Gloria Anzaldúa and pedagogy.
Go to Profile#257
Elif Shafak
#13232
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist. Shafak writes in Turkish and English, and has published 19 books. She is best known for her novels, which include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, Three Daughters of Eve and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Her works have been translated into 55 languages and have been nominated for several literary awards. She has been described by the Financial Times as "Turkey's leading female novelist", with several of her works having been bestsellers in Turkey and internat...
Go to Profile#258
Blue Balliett
#19926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Blue Balliett is an American author, who lives with her husband, three children, a grandson, and a cat. She is best known for her award-winning novel for children, Chasing Vermeer. She was born Elizabeth Balliett, but her family started calling her Blue shortly after her birth.
Go to Profile#259
Lan Samantha Chang
#21512
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is the author of The Family Chao and Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
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Molly Gloss
#30102
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Molly Gloss is an American writer of historical fiction and science fiction. Life Gloss grew up in rural Oregon and began writing seriously when she became a mother. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, and was close friends with fellow science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. She has taught writing and literature of the American West at Portland State University, and currently is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA program.
Go to Profile#261
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
#25826
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of the Humanities and a professor of English at Stanford University. Fishkin received her B.A. and M.Phil. in English, and her Ph.D. in American studies, all from Yale University. Before teaching at Stanford University, she served as director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University and professor of American studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
Go to Profile#262
Joyce Johnson
#15792
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Go to Profile#263
Elaine Feinstein
#16455
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Early life Born in Bootle, Lancashire, England, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father had left school at 12 and had little time for books, but he was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never ...
Go to Profile#264
ZZ Packer
#27295
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Zuwena "ZZ" Packer is an American writer. She is primarily known for her works of short fiction. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Illinois, Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood nickname; her given name is Zuwena. She was recognized as a talented writer at an early age, publishing in Seventeen at the age of 19. Packer is a 1990 graduate of Seneca High School, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Go to Profile#265
Marie Howe
#17546
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Marie Howe is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Magdalene . In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York. Early life Howe is the second eldest of nine children. She attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Rochester and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Windsor.
Go to Profile#266
Mona Van Duyn
#20455
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Mona Jane Van Duyn was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992. Biography Early years Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921, in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. She and Thurston studied in the Ph.D. program at Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there.
Go to Profile#267
Claudia Rankine
#11693
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Her book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry , the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, the 2015 PEN American Center USA Literary Award, the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2015 VIDA Literary Award.
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Jayne Anne Phillips
#27269
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. Education Phillips graduated from West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974, and later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
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Judith Fetterley
#30374
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Judith Fetterley is a literary scholar known for her work in feminism and women's studies. She was influential in leading a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the contributions of women writing about women's experience, including their perspectives on men in the world.
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Penelope Lively
#19944
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books . Children's fiction Lively first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague.
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Terry Castle
#16191
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Terry Castle is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I-era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe."
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Elizabeth Solopova
#26678
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
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Lucy Mangan
#16560
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Lucy Katherine Mangan is a British journalist and author. She is a columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian and an opinion writer for i news. A major part of her writing is related to feminism.
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Beverly Donofrio
#28202
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Beverly Ann Donofrio is an American memoirist, children's author, and creative writing teacher known for her 1992 best selling memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys. The memoir was adapted into the 2001 film Riding in Cars with Boys, directed by Penny Marshall, with Drew Barrymore portraying Donofrio.
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Merve Emre
#19434
Overall Influence
Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
Go to Profile#276
Carolyn Kizer
#17581
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, "Kizer reach[ed] into mythology in poems like Semele Recycled; into politics, into feminism, especially in her series of poems called "Pro Femina"; into science, the natural world, music, and translations and commentaries on Japanese and Chinese literatures".
Go to Profile#277
Anne Michaels
#25149
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction.
Go to Profile#278
Vira Vovk
#22221
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Vira Ostapivna Selianska Biography Born in Boryslav in 1926, she grew up in the Hutsul region in the town of Kuty . Vira Vovk's secondary education was completed in Lviv and Dresden. She studied Germanicss, music history and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen. In 1945, she emigrated with her mother to Portugal and in 1949, further to Brazil. She went to Rio de Janeiro where she completed her university studies. Post graduate studies were completed at Columbia University and Munich University.
Go to Profile#279
Judy Malloy
#19305
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.
Go to Profile#280
Melissa Febos
#21829
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart , and the essay collections, Abandon Me and Girlhood . Early life and education Febos grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a sea captain, and her mother a therapist. She left home at 16 after passing the GED, moved to Boston, and worked at an assortment of jobs including as a boatyard hand and as a chambermaid. She attended night courses at Harvard Extension School, then enrolled in The New School and moved to New York City in August 1999. She later earned an MF...
Go to Profile#281
Kiran Desai
#18906
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Kiran Desai is an Indiann author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
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Kiyoko Murata
#31236
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Kiyoko Murata is a Japanese writer. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes. The Government of Japan has awarded her the Medal with Purple Ribbon and Order of the Rising Sun, and she has been appointed to the Japan Art Academy. Her work has been adapted for film by Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Onchi.
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Amy Gerstler
#26505
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography Amy Gerstler was born in 1956. She is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.
Go to Profile#284
Rumer Godden
#15861
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951. A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#285
Sharon Creech
#28078
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sharon Creech is an American writer of children's novels. She was the first American winner of the Carnegie Medal for British children's books and the first person to win both the American Newbery Medal and the British Carnegie.
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Patricia Smith
#18353
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
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Anna Ogino
#29709
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Anna Ogino is a Japanese author and emeritus professor of literature at Keio University. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Itō Sei Literature Prize. Early years Ogino was born as Anna Gaillard in Naka-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, to a Japanese mother and a French-American father. Her mother, Kinuko Emi, was a prominent abstract painter. Ogino was naturalized during elementary school, and received her undergraduate and master's degree in French literature from Keio University, as well as receiving a scholarship to Paris-Sorbonne University to study Rabelais. In 2...
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Gillian Beer
#21534
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
Go to Profile#289
Sigrid Nunez
#24265
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Biography Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University , after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
Go to Profile#290
Sally Morgan
#14820
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Her works are on display in numerous private and public collections in Australia and around the world. Early life, education, and personal life Morgan was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1951 as the eldest of five children. She was raised by her mother Gladys and her maternal grandmother Daisy. Her mother, a member of the Bailgu people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, grew up in the Parkerville Children's Home as part of the Stolen Generations. Her father, William, a plumber by trade, died after a long-term battle with post-war experience post-traumatic stress disorder.
Go to Profile#291
Michèle Roberts
#23744
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother and English Protestant father , and has dual UK–France nationality. Early life Roberts was born to a French Catholic mother and English Protestant father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, but raised in Edgware, Middlesex. She was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith. She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian. She worked for the British Council i...
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Seanan McGuire
#15949
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Seanan McGuire is an American author and filker. McGuire is known for her urban fantasy novels. She uses the pseudonym Mira Grant to write science fiction/horror and the pseudonym A. Deborah Baker to write the "Up-and-Under" children's portal fantasy series.
Go to Profile#293
Gayl Jones
#27123
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature. Jones published her debut novel, Corregidora , at the age of 25. The book, edited by Toni Morrison, was met with critical acclaim and praised by leading intellectuals including James Baldwin and John Updike. Her sophomore novel Eva's Man was met with less renown and characterized as "dangerous" by some critics for its raw depiction of cruelty and violence. Jones continued publishing in the late 1990s, releasing The Healing and Mosquito—the former of which was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
Go to Profile#294
Merete Mazzarella
#51072
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Merete Mazzarella is a Swedo-Finnish prize-winning author and literature researcher. Life and work Mazzarella's mother was Danish, and father a Finnish ambassador. Her father's mother tongue was Finnish, but they spoke Swedish at home for practical reasons. Mazzarella learnt about Finland Swedish culture through literature.
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Harryette Mullen
#32639
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Harryette Mullen , Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles, is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. Life Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. Mullen's most recent work is Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary.
Go to Profile#296
Helen Tiffin
#28964
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Helen M. Tiffin is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and an influential writer in post-colonial theory and literary studies. Tiffin returned to Australia from Canada to take up her present post at the University of Tasmania. She was formerly Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in English and Post-Colonial Studies at Queen's University. Prior to her move to Canada, Tiffin held the post of Professor in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, where she was a founder member of the Postcolonial Re...
Go to Profile#297
Esther Allen
#24198
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Esther Allen is a writer, professor, and translator of French-language and Spanish-language literature into English. She is on the faculties of Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY . Allen co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature , and worked with PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants from their inception in 2003 to 2010. Allen heads the Development Committee of the American Literary Translators Association, and serves on the board of Writers Omi, part of Omi International Arts Center, on the Advisory Council to the Spanish-language program at the CUN...
Go to Profile#298
Flora Nwapa
#21673
Overall Influence
1931 - 1993 (62 years)
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa , was a Nigerian author who has been called the mother of modern African Literature. She was the forerunner to a generation of African women writers, and the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain. She achieved international recognition with her first novel Efuru, published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books. While never considering herself a feminist, she was best known for recreating life and traditions from an Igbo woman's viewpoint.
Go to Profile#299
Heather McHugh
#18250
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for the independent ranges of her aesthetic as a poet, and for her working devotion to teaching and translating literature. Early life and education McHugh was born in San Diego, California, to Canadian parents. They raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia. There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River. She began writing poetry at age five and claims to have become an expert eavesdropper by the age of twelve.
Go to Profile#300
Lurma Rackley
#15963
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Lurma M. Rackley is an American author, journalist and publicist. The daughter of a civil rights activist, she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was arrested 16 times before she was 13 years old. After college, she became a journalist and later, a publicist with the Washington, D.C. city government. In 1981, Petey Greene asked her to collaborate with him on his autobiography, recording audiotaped interviews with her shortly before his death. Rackley published her book about Greene in 2004.
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