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).
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2551
Enrica Malcovati
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.
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G. M. Hirst
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.
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Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
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Amy Clarke
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Amy Key Clarke was an English mystical poet and writer, and a teacher at The Cheltenham Ladies' College. Early life and education Clarke was born at 121 Elgin Crescent, Kensington, London, England to Henry Clarke, a lecturer and tutor, and his wife Amy , a writer and first headmistress of Truro High School.
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Marion Vera Cuthbert
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Marion Vera Cuthbert was an American writer and intellectual associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Cuthbert was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1920. She subsequently became principal of Burrel Normal School, then Dean of Women at Talladega College. In 1933, she delivered an address at the NAACP national convention entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." Cuthbert later received her master's degree and Doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro College Graduate," was a sociological study of the effects of education on the lives of African-American women.
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Hedwig Voegt
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt was a German literary scholar who obtained a doctorate in German-Jacobin literature when she was 49 and became a university professor at Leipzig University. While she was a younger woman, modest family circumstances ruled out an academic career. During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist , serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.
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Anne Carroll Moore
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Anne Carroll Moore was an American educator, writer and advocate for children's libraries. She was named Annie after an aunt, and officially changed her name to Anne in her fifties, to avoid confusion with Annie E. Moore, another woman who was also publishing material about juvenile libraries at that time. From 1906 to 1941 she headed children's library services for the New York Public Library system. Moore wrote Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, one of two runners-up for the 1925 Newbery Medal.
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Phoebe Sheavyn
1865 - 1968 (103 years)
Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn was a British literary scholar and feminist. She was a professor at Victoria University of Manchester. She was a founding member of the British Federation of University Women.
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Edith R. Mirrielees
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Professor Edith Ronald Mirrielees was a pioneering teacher of creative writing; she inspired many talented, distinguished students, including novelist John Steinbeck at Stanford University. Biography Edith Ronald Mirrielees was born on September 10, 1878, in Pittsfield, Illinois, and grew up in Big Timber, Montana.
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Milada Součková
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Milada Součková was a Czech writer, literary historian, and diplomat. She is known mainly for introducing to Czech literature Modernist techniques employed by English-language writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
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Alaíde Foppa
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Alaíde Foppa was a Guatemalan poet, writer, feminist, art critic, teacher and translator. Born in Barcelona, Spain she held Guatemalan citizenship and lived in exile in Mexico. She worked as a professor in both Guatemala and Mexico. Much of her poetry was published in Mexico and she co-founded one of the first feminist publications, Fem, in the country. After her husband's death, she made a trip to Guatemala to see her mother and renew her passport. She was detained and disappeared in Guatemala City on 19 December 1980, presumed to be murdered. Some sources note the date of her disappearance ...
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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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Barbara Ramsden
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Barbara Mary Ramsden was an Australian book editor who worked for Melbourne University Press from 1941 to 1967. Ramsden was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale to English migrants Edward and Edith Ramsden. She boarded at Ascham School, and intended to study medicine but instead enrolled in arts at the University of Sydney in 1924. The next year, she moved with her mother and brother to Melbourne, where she enrolled in the University of Melbourne and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree.
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Margaret Heavey
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Margaret Mary Heavey was a polyglot and classics scholar. She taught in the Classics department at University College Galway from 1931 to 1980, and worked primarily in Irish, translating from Greek and Latin along with writing original works.
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Michelle Reale
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michelle Reale is an Italian-American poet, academic and ethnographer. Reale is an associate professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. She uses poetic inquiry to present her research among African refugees in Sicily and her poetry is mainly concerned with Italian-American life, ethnic identity, histories, family dynamics and remembrance and forgetting. Among master's degrees in English and library and information science, she has an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in poetry. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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V. Penelope Pelizzon
1900 - Present (126 years)
V. Penelope Pelizzon is an American poet and essayist. Her first poetry collection, Nostos , won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time , was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc. , a critical study of film, photography, and crime narratives. She is a professor at the University of Connecticut.
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Nancy Barr Mavity
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Nann "Nancy" Barr Mavity was an American crime mystery author. Early life Nann "Nancy" Clark Barr was born on October 22, 1890, in Lawrenceville, Illinois, the daughter of Dr. Granville Walter Barr and Annabelle Applegate.
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Bettina Linn
1905 - 1962 (57 years)
Mary Bettina Linn was an American writer and college professor. She wrote three published novels, and was on the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. She worked with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
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C. Violet Butler
1884 - 1982 (98 years)
Christina Violet Butler was a social researcher and educator active in Oxford. She was known for her 1912 study Social Conditions in Oxford which recorded the lives of working class citizens in the Edwardian city. She also taught economics, women's studies, and trained social workers in Oxford.
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Clarice Short
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Clarice Short was an American poet and academic. Early life and education Clarice Short was born in Ellinwood, Kansas, and grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, and later near Taos, New Mexico. She attended the University of Kansas, where she earned her B. A. and M. A., She received her PhD from Cornell University in 1941.
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Hazel Hutchins Wilson
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Hazel Hutchins Wilson was an American writer of children's books who turned to writing after a career as a school and university librarian. Biography Born in Portland, Maine, she attended Bates College in Lewiston, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1919. In 1920 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston.
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Jessie Raven Crosland
1879 - 1973 (94 years)
Jessie Crosland was a scholar of medieval French literature, Lecturer in French at Westfield College. Life Jessie Raven was the youngest daughter of the Plymouth Brethren preacher Frederick Edward Raven . She married Joseph Beardsall Crosland, a civil servant whom she met through the Brethren, in 1904. In 1921, she accompanied her husband to the Cairo Conference on the Middle East, later relating her recollections of Winston Churchill's behaviour at the conference: She retired in 194647. Her son was the politician Anthony Crosland . She died on 16 June 1973, in Merton, London.
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Eliza Hall Kendrick
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Eliza Hall Kendrick was an American college professor. She taught Biblical history at Wellesley College from 1899 to 1931. She was active in ecumenical efforts both internationally and in New England.
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Helena Theresa Goessmann
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Helena Theresa Goessmann was an American lecturer, academic, and writer. During the course of 12 years, she gave over 1,000 lectures and talks on historical, educational, literary, and ethical subjects, in the US, including a period of four months in the winter of 1906, when she delivered in the leading Catholic girls' academies, between New York City, Saint Paul, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska, and New Orleans, Louisiana, a course, aggregating 125 lectures, on the "Ethics of Scholarship and Education Today". Goessmann served as the head of the department of History, Notre Dame College, Baltimore and professor of English at State College of Massachusetts .
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Grace Macurdy
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Grace Harriet Macurdy was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Bing Xin
1900 - 1999 (99 years)
Xie Wanying , better known by her pen name Bing Xin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bing Xin carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Changling.
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon
1802 - 1838 (36 years)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.
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Marina Tsvetaeva
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed.
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Lady Gregory
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
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Mary McCarthy
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Colette
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette , known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
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E. Nesbit
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
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Elizabeth Gaskell
1810 - 1865 (55 years)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell , often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novel...
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Selma Lagerlöf
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.
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Christina Rossetti
1830 - 1894 (64 years)
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.
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Flannery O'Connor
1925 - 1964 (39 years)
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters typically underpins the drama.
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Louisa May Alcott
1832 - 1888 (56 years)
Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet who wrote the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys . Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
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Harriet Monroe
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which she established in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.
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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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