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.
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2651
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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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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Harriet Beecher Stowe
1811 - 1896 (85 years)
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and became best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin , which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans. The book reached an audience of millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and in Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influenti...
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Emily Brontë
1818 - 1848 (30 years)
Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.
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Jean Rhys
1890 - 1979 (89 years)
Jean Rhys, was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea , written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her writing.
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Jane Ellen Harrison
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
Jane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane...
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Willa Cather
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
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Edith Wharton
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
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Katherine Anne Porter
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim.
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H.D.
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during...
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Shirley Jackson
1916 - 1965 (49 years)
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
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Andal
800 - 900 (100 years)
Andal , also known as Kothai, Nachiyar, and Godadevi, was the only female Alvar among the twelve Hindu poet-saints of South India. She was posthumously considered an avatar of the goddess Bhudevi. As with the Alvar saints, she was affiliated with the Sri Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Active in the 8th-century, with some suggesting 7th-century, Andal is credited with two great Tamil works, Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoḻi, which are still recited by devotees during the winter festival season of Margaḻi. Andal is a prominent figure for women in South India and has inspired several women's gro...
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Zora Neale Hurston
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
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Anna Laetitia Barbauld
1743 - 1825 (82 years)
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career that spanned more than half a century.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Naomi Mitchison
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
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Enid Blyton
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Enid Mary Blyton was an English children's writer, whose books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Her books are still enormously popular and have been translated into ninety languages. As of June 2019, Blyton held 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics, including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives. She is best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, the Five Find-Outers, and Malory Towers books, although she also wrote many others, including the St. ...
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Dorothy Wordsworth
1771 - 1855 (84 years)
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings.
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Aphra Behn
1640 - 1689 (49 years)
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea.
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Susan Glaspell
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy , A Little Princess , and The Secret Garden . Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor.
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Else Lasker-Schüler
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Else Lasker-Schüler was a German-Jewish poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Lasker-Schüler fled Nazi Germany and lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem.
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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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Anna Seghers
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Anna Seghers , is the pseudonym of a German writer notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City .
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Joanna Baillie
1762 - 1851 (89 years)
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.
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Nancy Cunard
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Isabel Briggs Myers
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year.
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Vicki Baum
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Hedwig "Vicki" Baum was an Austrian writer. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel , one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical. Education and personal life Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her mother Mathilde suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child. Her father, described as "a tyrannical, hypochondriac" man, was a bank clerk who was killed in 1942 in Novi Sad by soldiers of the Hungarian occupation. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society.
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Vera Brittain
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Edna Ferber
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big , Show Boat , Cimarron , Giant and Ice Palace , which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Ruth Plumly Thompson
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Ruth Plumly Thompson was an American writer of children's stories, best known for writing many novels placed in Oz, the fictional land of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels.
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Elizabeth Montagu
1718 - 1800 (82 years)
Elizabeth Montagu was a British social reformer, patron of the arts, salonnière, literary critic and writer, who helped to organize and lead the Blue Stockings Society. Her parents were both from wealthy families with strong ties to the British peerage and learned life. She was sister to Sarah Scott, author of A Description of Millenium [sic] Hall and the Country Adjacent. She married Edward Montagu, a man with extensive landholdings, to become one of the richer women of her era. She devoted this fortune to fostering English and Scottish literature and to the relief of the poor.
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Marie Laurencin
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or. Biography Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil painting. During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A member of both the circle of Pablo P...
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Lorraine Hansberry
1930 - 1965 (35 years)
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.
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