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,
#2651
Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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Anna Pavlova
1881 - 1931 (50 years)
Anna Pavlovna Pavlova was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India, Mexico and Australia.
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Gabrielle Roy
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian author from St. Boniface, Manitoba and one of the major figures in French Canadian literature. Early life Roy was born in 1909 in Saint-Boniface , Manitoba, and was educated at the Académie Saint-Joseph. She was born into a family of eleven children and reportedly began to write at an early age. She lived on rue Deschambault, a house and neighbourhood in Saint-Boniface that would later inspire one of her most famous works. The house is now a National Historic Site and museum in Winnipeg.
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Kate L. Turabian
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Kate Ledgerwood Turabian was an Armenian-American educator who is best known for her book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published the 9th edition of the book. The University of Chicago Press estimates that the various editions of this book have sold more than 9 million copies since its publication in 1937. A 2016 analysis of over one million college course syllabi found that Turabian was the most commonly assigned female author due to this book.
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Lillian Hellman
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belon...
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Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea...
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Ellen Glasgow
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim. A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
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Adelaide Crapsey
1878 - 1914 (36 years)
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Rochester, New York. Her parents were the businesswoman Adelaide T. Crapsey and the Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who moved from New York City to Rochester.
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Alice Dalgliesh
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
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Marian Engel
1933 - 1985 (52 years)
Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear , a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.
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Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, born Karoline Michaelis was a German-Portuguese romanist. Early life, education and private life Michaelis was born in Berlin as the last of five children of Gustav Michaelis, a mathematics teacher.
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Louise Holland
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Louise Adams Holland was a philologist, university teacher, academic and archaeologist. Early life and education Born in Brooklyn in New York State in 1893 as Louise Elizabeth Whetenhall Adams, she was the third child but first daughter of six children of Henrietta and Charles Frederick Adams, a lawyer. Her younger sister was the United States Poet Laureate Léonie Adams. Louise Holland graduated from Barnard College in 1914 having specialised in Greek, and was awarded her M. A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1920, where she studied Latin. She studied at the...
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María Rosa Lida de Malkiel
1910 - 1962 (52 years)
María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, born Maria Rosa Lida , was an Argentine philologist. Notable as an Hispanist medievalist, she came to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation program of study. Beginning in 1947, Lida de Malkiel lectured for many years in the US, including at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford. An advisor to the editorial boards of two professional journals, in the 1950s she was admitted to the Real Academia Española and the Academia Argentina de Letras.
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Mary Pix
1666 - 1709 (43 years)
Mary Pix was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called "a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods".
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Dorothy Scarborough
1878 - 1935 (57 years)
Emily Dorothy Scarborough was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest. Early life Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.
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Barbara Sleigh
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh was an English children's writer and broadcaster. She is remembered most for her Carbonel series about a king of cats. Family and career Barbara Sleigh was born on 9 January 1906 in Birmingham, the daughter of an artist, Bernard Sleigh, and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both parents came from a Methodist background, but she was brought up an Anglican. The family moved to Chesham for a time, then back to Birmingham. Their marriage broke up in about 1914. Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh , would also become a writer.
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Madeline Gleason
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild. In 1947, she became the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 .
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Barbara Leonard Reynolds
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Barbara Leonard Reynolds , was an American author who became a Quaker, peace activist and educator. In 1951, Reynolds moved with her husband to Hiroshima where he conducted a three-year study on the effects of radiation on children who had survived the first atomic bomb. She and her family then became peace activists, sailing around the world to protest nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, she traveled around the world with atomic bomb survivors to show world leaders, first-hand, the horrors of nuclear warfare. She then established the World Friendship Center, devoting 13 years to it, and don...
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Ella Young
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Ella Young was an Irish poet and Celtic mythologist active in the Gaelic and Celtic Revival literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in Ireland, Young was an author of poetry and children's books. She emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1925 as a temporary visitor and lived in California. For five years she gave speaking tours on Celtic mythology at American universities, and in 1931 she was involved in a publicized immigration controversy when she attempted to become a citizen.
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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Marion Davies
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Anica Savić Rebac
1892 - 1953 (61 years)
Anica Savić-Rebac was a Serbian writer, classical philologist, translator, professor at the University of Belgrade. She wrote a number of essays and books about Njegoš, Goethe, Sophocles, Spinoza, Thomas Mann, Greek mystical philosophers, Plato, theory of literature. She also translated a number of works from Serbian into English, most notably The Ray of the Microcosm by Petar II Petrović-Njegoš.
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Son Sohui
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Son Sohui was a South Korean writer of novels and short stories. A leading woman writer in the colonial and postwar periods, she is considered one of the first Korean authors to address women's psychological struggles in fiction.
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Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Alla Nazimova
1879 - 1945 (66 years)
Alla Nazimova was a Russian-American actress, director, producer and screenwriter. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. She later moved on to film, where she served many production roles, both writing and directing films under pseudonyms. Her film Salome is regarded as a cultural landmark.
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Josefina Passadori
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Josefina Passadori was an Italian-Argentine academic, educator, and writer. She published several textbooks as well as poetry under the pen name Fröken Thelma. Biography Passadori was born in Mezzanino, Pavia, Italy. In 1922, she graduated from La Unidad Académica Escuela Normal Superior N° 1 Mary O. Graham in La Plata, where she taught for almost forty years .
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Helen Gray Cone
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Helen Gray Cone was a poet and professor of English literature. She spent her entire career at Hunter College in New York City. Early life and education Cone was born in New York and attended the Normal College of the City of New York, later renamed Hunter College. She graduated in 1876 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and became an instructor in the Normal College English department. In the 1880s she served as president of the Associate Alumnae of the Normal College.
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Josefina Niggli
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Josefina Niggli was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Cri...
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Eva Le Gallienne
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.
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Ann Stanford
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Ann Stanford was an American poet. Early life and education Ann Stanford was born in La Habra, California and attended Stanford University where she graduated in 1938 Phi Beta Kappa, and University of California, Los Angeles, with an M.A. in journalism in 1958, an M.A. in English in 1961, and a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1962.
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Caroline Ransom Williams
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Caroline Ransom Williams was an Egyptologist and classical archaeologist. She was the first American woman to be professionally trained as an Egyptologist. She worked extensively with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other major institutions with Egyptian collections, and published Studies in ancient furniture , The Tomb of Perneb , and The Decoration of the Tomb of Perneb: The Technique and the Color Conventions , among others. During the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's first season in Luxor, she helped to develop the "Chicago House method" ...
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Julia Irvine
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine was the fourth president of Wellesley College, serving from 1894 to 1899. Irvine was the daughter of Indiana suffragist Mary M. Thomas. A Cornell University graduate, she came to Wellesley College as a professor of Greek in 1890. During her tenure as Wellesley president, she enacted a number of reforms and eliminated some of the rules for students such as silent time, domestic work, the prohibition on Sunday library hours and mandatory Chapel attendance. She replaced several professors, especially those without advanced degrees, as part of an overhaul of academic...
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Viola S. Wendt
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Viola Sophia Wendt was an American poet and educator. Early life and education Wendt was born into a farming family in Boise, Idaho, in March 1907, the first of two daughters of Carl Wendt. Her parents moved to West Bend, Wisconsin in 1914 in order for her father to pursue new business opportunities. Viola was educated there, graduating from West Bend High School in 1924. She was a bright student, especially excelling at languages, writing, and literary analysis. Accordingly, Wendt entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison , majoring in English Literature. During her time there as an und...
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Sophie Jewett
1861 - 1909 (48 years)
Sophie Jewett , also known under the pseudonym Ellen Burroughs, was an American lyric poet, translator, and professor at Wellesley College. Much of her poetry contains lesbian themes. Family Jewett was born in Moravia, New York, one of four children of Charles Carroll Jewett, a doctor, and Ellen Ransom Jewett. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father when she was 9, after which she was raised by an uncle, Daniel Burroughs, and her grandmother in Buffalo. Her sister Louise became a noted art historian. In Buffalo, she developed a friendship with Mary Whiton Calkins, the daughter of her mi...
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Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley was an English gardening author and instructor. Her Glynde College for Lady Gardeners in East Sussex had the patronage of famous gardening names such as Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, and William Robinson.
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Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė
1886 - 1958 (72 years)
Sofija Čiurlionienė née Kymantaitė was a Lithuanian writer, educator, and activist. After studies at girls' gymnasiums in Saint Petersburg and Riga, she studied philosophy, literature, art history at the and Jagiellonian University. She returned to Lithuania in 1907 and joined the cultural life of Vilnius. In January 1909, she married painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, but he died in April 1911 leaving her with an infant daughter. Until the start of World War I, she taught Lithuanian language and literature at teachers' courses established by the Saulė Society in Kaunas. She lectured at the Vytautas Magnus University from 1925 to her retirement in 1938.
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Zola Helen Ross
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Zola Helen Ross was a Pacific Northwest writer. She also taught writing and co-founded the Pacific Northwest Writers Association with Lucile Saunders McDonald of The Seattle Times. She wrote in various genres, including adventure, children's fiction, crime, mystery, and suspense. She was also the author of several Western historical novels; her male counterpart was Louis L'Amour. The Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin are the settings for her stories, and they include the towns of Reno, San Francisco, and Seattle. Ross occasionally wrote under the pseudonyms Helen Arre and Bert Iles. She ...
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Varvara Adrianova-Peretz
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Professor Varvara Pavlovna Adrianova-Peretz was a Soviet and Russian philologist and medievalist specializing in Old Russian literature, folklore, and hagiography. She was a corresponding member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union .
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Maria Timpanaro Cardini
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Maria Timpanaro Cardini , born Maria Cardini, was an Italian philologist who studied the history of ancient philosophy and history of science. Biography Cardini was born in Arezzo on August 24, 1890. She received her degree in Greek philology in Naples in 1914. She traveled briefly to Berlin to study with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Diels. Cardini was active for several years as a dadaist poet. She was friends with, among others, Tristan Tzara, but abandoned poetic practice in 1920.
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Mary Vivian Hughes
1866 - 1956 (90 years)
Mary Vivian Hughes , usually known as Molly Hughes and published under M. V. Hughes, was a British educator and author. Life The daughter of a London stockbroker, she was born Mary Thomas and passed most of her childhood in Canonbury, under the watchful eyes of four older brothers. Her father, a modestly successful stockbroker, was discovered dead on a train line in 1879. His death remains a mystery. She attended the North London Collegiate School and the Cambridge Training College for Women, and was later awarded her BA in London.
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Anwara Bahar Chowdhury
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Anwara Bahar Chowdhury was a Bangladeshi social activist and writer. Background and education Chowdhury was admitted to Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School, established by women rights activist Begum Rokeya. She passed matriculation in 1934. She completed her higher secondary school examination and BA degree from Bethune College of Kolkata. She passed Bachelor in Teaching from Scottish Church College in 1941.
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Elizabeth Williams Champney
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Elizabeth Williams Champney was an American author of novels and juvenile literature, as well as travel writing, most of which featured foreign locations. Champney's observations and experiences during her European travels were published in Harper's Magazine, and also in The Century Magazine. She published eighty or more articles in Harper's and Century, including a series on Portugal, and papers entitled "A Neglected Corner of Europe", and "In the Footsteps of Futuney and Regnault". After her return to the United States, Champney wrote fifteen books; novels, stories for juveniles, and historical works under cover of stories, mostly adapted to young people.
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Mary Bigelow Ingham
1832 - 1923 (91 years)
Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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Beatrice White
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Beatrice Mary Irene White was a British literary scholar. She had a long association with Westfield College and the English Association. Life White was born in Ely in 1902. In 1919 she started her studies at King's College, London and four years later she graduated with a first class honours degree in English. Three years after that she obtained her master's degree at King's with a thesis about the life and works of the English poet Alexander Barclay. White went on for an extra two years to create an edition of Barclay's "Eclogues" in 1928. She dedicated this book to Professor A. W. Reed who ...
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Helen Rose Hull
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Helen Rose Hull was born in Albion, Michigan. She is remembered as a novelist, feminist, and English professor. Beginning her teaching career at Wellesley College and Barnard College, she went on to teach creative writing at the Ivy League institution, Columbia University for forty years with her lifelong partner, Mabel Louise Robinson.
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Henrietta Gould Rowe
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Henrietta Gould Rowe was an American litterateur and author of the long nineteenth century. Biography Henrietta Gould was born in East Corinth, Maine, 1835. She was the daughter of Aaron and Sarah Gould. Rowe received an academic education.
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Gracie Fields
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Dame Gracie Fields was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.
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A. M. Dale
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Amy Marjorie Dale, , published as A. M. Dale, was a British classicist and academic. Life Dale was born in 1901. She studied Classics as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. She subsequently studied under Ludwig Radermacher at the University of Vienna, and at the University of Lund under Albert Wifstrand. Her first academic post, from 1927 to 1929, was at Westfield College in the University of London, followed by a further post at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
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