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.
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2501
Ella E. Clark
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Ella Elizabeth Clark was an American educator, writer, and Professor Emerita of English. Although Clark was not a trained anthropologist or folklorist, she collected large numbers of American Indian and First Nations oral traditions and made them available to a wide readership.
Go to Profile#2502
Alice Henson Ernst
1880 - 1980 (100 years)
Alice Henson Ernst was an American playwright, professor and author. She conducted anthropological work among the Native Americans in Oregon. Ernst was also well-known for her history and research of pioneer theater in the northwest. Ernst taught English and drama at the University of Washington and the University of Oregon.
Go to Profile#2503
Anne Sexton
1928 - 1974 (46 years)
Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.
Go to Profile#2504
Gladys Schmitt
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Gladys Leonore Schmitt was an American writer, editor, and professor. Described by the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1942 as one of the city's "literary lights, her second novel, David the King became a Literary Guild selection which rose to number one on national bestseller lists.
Go to Profile#2505
Helen Hull Law
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Helen Hull Law was a professor of Latin and Greek at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1914 until 1927 where her "depth and breadth of scholarship would have frightened the freshmen had not her charming shyness made them feel that they must put her at ease." In 1923 she founded and organized the Kappa Nu Sigma honor society on campus. Law later became professor of Greek at Wellesley College and retired in 1954 after 28 years.
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Léonie Villard
1878 - 1970 (92 years)
Léonie Villard was a French literary critic and professor at the Université de Lyon. She was the first woman to be a professor of literature at a French university. In 1917 she received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book, Jane Austen: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre. She was also a member of the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 1937 and 1950–1951. The college holds her diary of life in Vichy France during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#2507
June Rose Colby
1856 - 1941 (85 years)
June Rose Colby was an American professor of literature. She was the first female faculty member and third woman hired as an instructor at Illinois State Normal University, and was a supporter of the Suffragist movement.
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Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
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Elizabeth Bishop
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
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Marion Clinch Calkins
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Marion Clinch Calkins was an American poet, writer, and teacher who taught English and Art History at the University of Wisconsin and wrote about the labor movement, industrial espionage, and fascism in America.
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Margaret Deland
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Margaret Deland was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement. Biography Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.
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Sappho
650 BC - 550 BC (100 years)
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sapph...
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Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
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Jane Austen
1775 - 1817 (42 years)
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
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Emily Dickinson
1830 - 1886 (56 years)
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom.
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Anna Akhmatova
1889 - 1966 (77 years)
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received the second-most nominations for the award the following year.
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George Eliot
1819 - 1880 (61 years)
Mary Ann Evans , known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede , The Mill on the Floss , Silas Marner , Romola , Felix Holt, the Radical , Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda . Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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Marianne Moore
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Early life Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. Her father, John Milton Moore, a mechanical engineer and inventor, suffered a psychotic episode, as a consequence of which her parents separated before she was born; Moore never met him. She and her elder brother, John Warner Moore, were reared by their mother, Mary Warner Moore.
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Mary Shelley
1797 - 1851 (54 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Dorothy Parker
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed...
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806 - 1861 (55 years)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English.
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Charlotte Brontë
1816 - 1855 (39 years)
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the gender neutral pen name Currer Bell. Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
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Rebecca West
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield , known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon , on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder , her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason , later The New Meaning of Treason , a study of th...
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George Sand
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil , best known by her pen name George Sand , was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era, with more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
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Beatrix Potter
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was her first commercially published work in 1902. Her books, including 23 Tales, have sold more than 250 million copies. An entrepreneur, Potter was a pioneer of character merchandising. In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy, making him the oldest licensed character.
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Dorothy L. Sayers
1893 - 1957 (64 years)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic. Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel Whose Body? was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love.
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Sylvia Plath
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel , and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
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Murasaki Shikibu
973 - 1014 (41 years)
was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be one of the world's first novels, written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012. Murasaki Shikibu is a descriptive name; her personal name is unknown, but she may have been , who was mentioned in a 1007 court diary as an imperial lady-in-waiting.
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Anaïs Nin
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris , and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.
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Katherine Mansfield
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a New Zealand writer and critic who is considered to be an important author of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages.
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Alice B. Toklas
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein. Early life Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco into a middle-class Polish Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather was a rabbi, whose son Feivel Toklas moved to San Francisco in 1863. In 1876, Ferdinand Toklas married Emma Levinsky and they had two children: Alice and her brother Clarence Ferdinand .
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and hackwork verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.
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Edith Sitwell
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
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Nelly Sachs
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Nelly Sachs was a German–Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is ; other works include the poems "" , "" , and the collections of poetry , , , and . She was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Zelda Fitzgerald
1900 - 1948 (48 years)
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage.
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Marie de France
1101 - 1300 (199 years)
Marie de France was a poet, possibly born in what is now France, who lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an unknown court, but she and her work were almost certainly known at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts. However, one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse.
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Bertha von Suttner
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was an Austro-Bohemian noblewoman, pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate , the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian laureate.
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Amy Lowell
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Life Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, th...
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Lesya Ukrainka
1871 - 1913 (42 years)
Lesya Ukrainka was a Ukrainian playwright and poet who is regarded as Ukrainian literature's foremost writers. She was also an active political, civil, and feminist activist. Among her best-known works are the collections of poems On the Wings of Songs , Thoughts and Dreams , Echos , the epic poem Ancient Fairy Tale , One Word , plays Princess , Cassandra , In the Catacombs , and Forest Song .
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Käte Hamburger
1896 - 1992 (96 years)
Käte Hamburger was a Germanist, literary scholar and philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Stuttgart. Hamburger earned her doctorate in 1922 in Munich. Expelled by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage, she immigrated to Sweden in 1934, where she lived until 1956, earning her living as a language teacher, journalist and writer. She resumed her university career on her return to Germany, writing about Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
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Phillis Wheatley
1753 - 1784 (31 years)
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
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Marie Corelli
1855 - 1924 (69 years)
Mary Mackay , also called Minnie Mackey and known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli , was an English novelist. From the appearance of her first novel A Romance of Two Worlds in 1886, she became a bestselling fiction-writer, her works largely concerned with Christianity, reincarnation, astral projection and mysticism. Yet despite her many distinguished patrons, she was often ridiculed by critics. Corelli lived her later years in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose historic buildings she fought hard to preserve.
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
1689 - 1762 (73 years)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Born in 1689, Lady Mary spent her early life in England. In 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Lady Mary joined her husband on the Ottoman excursion, where she was to spend the next two years of her life. During her time there, Lady Mary wrote extensively on her experience as a woman in Ottoman Constantinople. After her return to England, Lady Mary devoted her attention to the upbringing of her family before dying of cancer in 1762.
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Clarice Lispector
1920 - 1977 (57 years)
Clarice Lispector was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
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Madame d'Aulnoy
1652 - 1705 (53 years)
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French author known for her literary fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fées , she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre.
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Maria Edgeworth
1768 - 1849 (81 years)
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her firs...
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Grazia Deledda
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda , also known in Sardinian language as Gràssia or Gràtzia Deledda , was an Italian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [i.e. Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general". She was the first Italian woman to receive the prize, and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.
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Carson McCullers
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the Deep South.
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Felicia Hemans
1793 - 1835 (42 years)
Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet . Two of her opening lines, "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The stately homes of England", have acquired classic status. Early life and education Felicia Dorothea Browne was the daughter of George Browne, who worked for his father-in-law's wine importing business and succeeded him as Tuscan and imperial consul in Liverpool, and Felicity, daughter of Benedict Paul Wagner , wine importer at 9 Wolstenholme Square, Liverpool and Venetian consul for that city. Hemans was the fourth of six children to survive infancy. Her sister Harriett collaborated musically with Hemans and later edited her complete works .
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Anne Brontë
1820 - 1849 (29 years)
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, and the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Otherwise, she attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 lived elsewhere working as a governess. In 1846 she published a book of poems with her sisters and later two novels, initially under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 at the same time as Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë.
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