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
Lida Shaw King
1868 - 1932 (64 years)
Lida Shaw King was an American classical scholar and college dean. Biography Lida Shaw King was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Henry Melville King and Susan Ellen Fogg King. She graduated from Vassar College in 1890 and from Brown University in 1894 and continued her graduate studies at Vassar , Radcliffe , Bryn Mawr , and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens where she was awarded the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship. She taught the classics at Vassar and at the Packer Collegiate Institute , and at Brown was assistant professor of classical philology , dea...
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Blanche Colton Williams
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Blanche Colton Williams was an American author, editor, department head and professor of English literature, and pioneer in women’s higher education. She was known for her “groundbreaking work on structure and analysis of the short story” and is credited with having done more for the short story genre than anyone in her lifetime. An 1898 graduate of Industrial Institute and College in Columbus, Mississippi, the first public women’s university in the United States, Williams went on to a three-decade career at Hunter College, a women’s college in New York City.
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Wilmer Cave Wright
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Emily Wilmer Cave Wright was a British-born American classical philologist, and a contributor to the culture and history of medicine. She was a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she taught Greek. Wright's works include, The Emperor Julian’s relation to the new sophistic and neo-Platonism , A Short History of Greek Literature, from Homer to Julian , Julian , Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists , Against the Galilaeans , Hieronymi Fracastorii de contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri III , and De morbis artificum Bernardini Ramazini diatriba . Giovanni Ma...
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Leigh Brackett
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She was also a screenwriter, known for The Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , and The Long Goodbye . She worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back , elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production. In 1956, her book The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and, along with C. L. Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2020, she posthumously won a Retro Hugo for her novel The Nemesis...
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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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Elisabeth Jastrow
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Elisabeth Jastrow was a German-born American classical archaeologist. Her research focus included arulae . Early life and education Elisabeth Anna Marie Jastrow was born October 7, 1890, in Berlin. She came from a family of assimilated German Jews. Her father was the historian and social scientist, Ignaz Jastrow. Through her father, she grew up in a world full of scholars and artists, the sister Lotte Beate Jastrow Hahn later combined education and horticulture.
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Elinor Glyn
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Elinor Glyn was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.
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Choe Jeong-hui
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Choe Jeong-hui was one of the most successful early women writers in South Korea. Life She was born in Dancheon, South Hamgyong Province and was educated in Seoul. She worked at a kindergarten in Tokyo and as a journalist in Seoul before starting her writing career in 1931; she worked for the magazine Samcheolli and the newspaper The Chosun Ilbo . She was associated with the Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation, and was jailed in 1934 as a result.
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Emma Roberts
1794 - 1840 (46 years)
Emma Roberts , often referred to as "Miss Emma Roberts", was an English travel writer and poet known for her memoirs about India. In her own time, she was well regarded, and William Jerdan considered her "a very successful cultivator of the belles lettres".
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Alice Werner
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Alice Werner CBE was a writer, poet and teacher of the Bantu languages. Life Alice Werner was one of seven children in the family of Reinhardt Joseph Werner of Mainz, teacher of languages, and his wife, Harriett. Her father travelled extensively during the first fifteen years of her life, and she lived in New Zealand, Mexico, United States and throughout Europe, until the family settled in Tonbridge, England, in 1874.
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Rachel Hunter
1754 - 1813 (59 years)
Rachel Hunter was an English woman novelist of the early 19th century who lived and worked in Norwich. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Literary setting Rachel Hunter wrote for the same circulating library readership as Jane Austen, and like the latter she might belittle standard novel conventions in writings like Letitia. Her writings were well known in the Austen circle, one acquaintance describing a state of well-being as "quite Palmerstone", after Hunter's Letters from Mrs Palmerstone.
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Saralabala Sarkar
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Saralabala Sarkar was an Indian Bengali writer. Early life Saralabala Sarkar was born on 10 December 1875 in Katalpora, Nadia District, Bengal Presidency, British Raj. Her ancestral house was in Bhar Ramdia, Faridpur District, Bengal Presidency. She was home schooled. She was married to Sarat Chandra Sarkar when she was twelve years old. Her husband died when she was twenty-three. Her grandmother was Shreemati Rasasundari, a writer herself, notable for her autobiography that provided a keen insight into the life of a 19th-century Bengali housewife.
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Evelyn Eaton
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and academic known for her early novels set in New France, and later writings which explored spirituality. Life account Born in Montreux, Switzerland, Eaton was the daughter of Canadians Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Isaac Vernon Eaton, an army officer from Nova Scotia, and Myra Fitzrandolph of New Brunswick. Eaton was the younger of two daughters. Lt.-Col. Eaton was killed in 1917, while directing the artillery assault at the battle of Vimy Ridge in France, when Evelyn Eaton was just 14. Evelyn's older sister, Helen Moira...
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Abby Leach
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Abby Leach was as an American educator and professor of Greek and Latin at Vassar College. She was appointed as the first female president of the American Philological Association in 1899. Formative years and family Born in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 28, 1855, Abby Leach was one of five children of Marcus and Eliza Paris Bourne Leach. Her father was an owner of a shoemaking business.
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Antonina Riasanovsky
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Antonina Riasanovsky was a Russian Empire-born writer who, under the pen name Nina Fedorova, wrote The Family, the tenth highest selling fiction book in the United States 1940. The book won the 1940 $10,000 fiction novel prize from the Atlantic Monthly. The Family tells the story of an exiled White Russian family in Tianjin, China.
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Marion Cummings
1876 - 1926 (50 years)
Alice Marion Cummings was a California-born poet, philosopher, and academic. She taught philosophy, psychology, and the history of education for most of her career at University of Arizona. Cummings edited two poetry anthologies and her own poetry was published in popular periodicals such as Smart Set, Harper's, Commonwealth, Lippincott's, and The Forum. Cummings had a short-lived but intense friendship with poet Sara Teasdale, who wrote several poems about Cummings. The two continued their friendship through correspondence.
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Mary Nourse
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Mary Augusta Nourse was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.
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Gertrud Herzog-Hauser
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Gertrud Herzog-Hauser was an Austrian classical philologist. She was specialised in ancient mythology and religion as well as Latin literature and published Latin school textbooks. She campaigned for equal rights for women in education.
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Clara Beranger
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Clara Beranger was an American screenwriter of the silent film era and a member of the original faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Biography Beranger was born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland, to Benjamin and Fannie Strouse. Her family was of German Jewish descent. Benjamin and his brothers had emigrated and opened a dry-goods store in Indiana.
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Jennifer Clarvoe
1900 - Present (124 years)
Jennifer S. Clarvoe is an American poet and English professor at Kenyon College. She has published two books of poetry, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2001.
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Ruth Bellamy
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Ruth Bellamy , also known as Ruth Bellamy Brownwood, was an American writer, a journalist, dramatist, songwriter, actress, and poet, based in North Carolina and Japan. Early life and education Ruth Elizabeth Bellamy was born in Enfield, North Carolina, the daughter of Phesington Sugg Bellamy and Lula Spruill Bellamy. Her father was a businessman. Her mother, known as "Mamee", was a well-known social figure in Rocky Mount in her later years.
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Fanny Brice
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Fania Borach , known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedian, illustrated song model, singer, and actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.
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Viola Brothers Shore
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Viola Brothers Shore was an American author who worked in a variety of mediums from the 1910s through the 1930s. Married three times, she began her writing career as a poet and a writer of short stories and articles or magazines. Toward the end of the silent film era, she began writing screenplays, and eventually expanded into theatrical plays and novels. Her daughter, Wilma Shore, was also a successful writer.
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H. B. Goodwin
1827 - 1893 (66 years)
Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Barbara P. McCarthy
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.
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Worth Tuttle Hedden
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Worth Tuttle Hedden was an American writer who released four books between the 1940s and 1950s. Of her works, Wives of High Pasture became available in 1944 while The Other Room came out in 1947. The following year,The Other Room received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. After publishing Love is a Wound in 1952, Two and Three Make One was made public in 1956 under her pen name Winifred Woodley. Apart from books, Tuttle wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica between 1927 and 1928 while also writing for magazines such as The World Tomorrow. She advocated for civil rights. She won a Sou...
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Judy Canova
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Judy Canova , born Juliette Canova , was an American comedienne, actress, singer, and radio personality. She appeared on Broadway and in films. She hosted her own self-titled network radio program, a popular series broadcast from 1943 to 1955.
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Dorothy Thursby-Pelham
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Dorothy Elizabeth Thursby-Pelham was a scientist at the Zoological Laboratory, University of Cambridge and subsequently at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food - Directorate of Fisheries laboratory in Lowestoft who has been called 'England's first female sea-going fisheries scientist' and was an active member of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea .
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Virgínia Rau
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Virgínia de Bivar Robertes Rau was a Portuguese archaeologist and historian. She was an expert on Portuguese and Portuguese colonial history and author of many history books. She was the daughter of Luís Rau, Jr. of German descent, and his wife Matilde de Bivar de Paula Robertes of Spanish descent, who married in Lisbon in 1902. She enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in 1927, but the following year went aboard, where she attended several courses including at the University of Toulouse. In 1939, due to the beginning of the Second World War, she returned to Lisbon, where she joined the Historical and Philosophical Sciences of the Faculty of Arts.
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Florence Bonime
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Florence Bonime was an American novelist. She also published under the name Florence Cummings. Life Florence Bonime was born May 12, 1907 in the Bronx. When she was 16 she began working in advertising, eventually becoming a copywriter.
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Roslyn Brogue
1919 - 1981 (62 years)
Roslyn Brogue was an American pianist, violinist, music educator, classics scholar, poet, author and composer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937, from Radcliffe College in 1943 and from Harvard University in 1947 with a Ph.D.
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Julia Bastin
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Julia Bastin was a Belgian academic, educator and novelist. Biography She was born in Liège and grew up there. Bastin studied at The Hague, earning a diploma that allowed her to teach Dutch. From 1912 to 1914, she taught at a middle school in Braine-le-Comte. Bastin spent World War I in England and studied languages at Bedford College, particularly French literature from the Middle Ages. She was also a teaching assistant for French conversation and composition courses at the college. Afterwards, she taught in secondary schools in Derbyshire and then Yorkshire. From 1920 to 1931, she lived in ...
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