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,
#2751
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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Mary Sidney
1561 - 1621 (60 years)
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra . She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the ...
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Yevgenia Ginzburg
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia. Family and early career Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. The family moved to Kazan in 1909. In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak teacher. In April 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent , specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, on May 25, she was named head of the new department of the history of Leninism.
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Marjorie Hope Nicolson
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Marjorie Hope Nicolson was an American literary scholar. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. Early life and education Nicolson was the daughter of Charles Butler Nicolson, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Free Press during World War I and later that paper's correspondent in Washington, DC, and Lissie Hope Morris.
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Babette Deutsch
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist. Background Babette Deutsch was born on September 22, 1895, in New York City. Her parents were of Michael Deutsch and Melanie Fisher Deutsch. She matriculated from the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A. She published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard.
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Enid Starkie
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Enid Mary Starkie CBE , was an Irish literary critic, known for her biographical works on French poets. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Lecturer and then Reader in the University.
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Christina Stead
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Christina Stead was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party. She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.
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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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Alice Voinescu
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Alice Voinescu was a Romanian writer, essayist, university professor, theatre critic, and translator. She was the first Romanian woman to become a Doctor of Philosophy, which she did at the Sorbonne in 1913 in Paris. In 1922, she became a professor of theatrical history at what would become the Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bucharest, where she taught for over two decades. In 1948, she was removed from her department and spent a year and seven months in prisons in Jilava and Ghencea. After her detention, she was kept under house arrest in the village of Costești near Târgu Frumos until 1954.
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Janet Lewis
1899 - 1998 (99 years)
Janet Loxley Lewis was an American novelist, poet, and librettist. Biography Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and her future husband Yvor Winters. She was an active member of the University of Chicago Poetry Club. She taught at both Stanford University in California, and the University of California at Berkeley.
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Helen Magill White
1853 - 1944 (91 years)
Dr. Helen Magill White was an American academic and instructor. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States. Early life and education Helen Magill was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Edward Hicks Magill and Sarah Warner Beans. She was the eldest of six children in a Quaker family. Magill was brought up to believe that she deserved the same education as a man and all five Magill daughters were educated to become college teachers. In 1859, the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Magill enrolled as the only female student in the Boston Public Latin School. Her fath...
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Agnes Sligh Turnbull
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Agnes Sligh Turnbull was a bestselling American writer, most noted for her works of historical fiction based in her native Western Pennsylvania. Biography Her parents were Alexander Halliday Sligh, an immigrant from Scotland, and Lucinda Hannah McConnell, also of Scottish descent. She attended the village school, and went on to boarding school before enrolling at the Teachers College at what is now called Indiana University of Pennsylvania, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She also attended the University of Chicago before starting her career as a high school English teacher.
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Yvonne Georgi
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Yvonne Georgi was a German dancer, choreographer and ballet mistress. She was known for her comedic talents and her extraordinary jumping ability. In her roles as a dancer, choreographer, and ballet mistress, she was an influential figure in dance for decades.
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Fanny Kemble
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre.
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Charlotte Anne Moberly
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Charlotte Anne Elizabeth Moberly was an English academic, and first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. Her claimed time-travel book An Adventure, written in 1911 with fellow academic Eleanor Jourdain, became a bestseller.
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Mildred K. Pope
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Mildred Katherine Pope was an English scholar of Anglo-Norman England. She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford University, where she taught at Somerville College. Biography Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham. She read French at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1893 was placed in the first-class of the Oxford University women's examination. Interested in Old French philology, as an undergraduate "she had to rely mainly on tuition by correspondence from Paget Toynbee at Cambridge". She taught at Somerville College, Oxford, first as a librarian, and from 1894 as a lecturer.
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Anne Charlotte Leffler
1849 - 1892 (43 years)
Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, duchess of Caianello , was a Swedish author. Biography She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag. Her brother was noted mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Leffler was initially educated privately and then a student at the Wallinska skolan from the age of thirteen, at that time perhaps the most progressive school open to females in Stockholm.
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Helen L. Webster
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Helen L. Webster was an American philologist and educator. She taught at Vassar College, 1889–90, at same time giving a course of lectures on comparative philology at Barnard College. She served as professor of comparative philology in Wellesley College. 1890–9; and was the principal of the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Institute, 1899–1904. Webster was the author of: A Treatise on the Guttural Question in Gothic . She edited, The Legends of the Micmacs, 1893. Additional, she lectured and contributed to educational periodicals. Webster made her home in Farmington, Connecticut.
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María Bibiana Benítez
1783 - 1873 (90 years)
María Bibiana Benítez Batista was Puerto Rico's first female poet and one of its first playwrights. She was the first of three renowned poets in her family, the others being her niece and adopted daughter Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier, and Alejandrina's son José Gautier Benítez.
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Elizabeth Inchbald
1753 - 1821 (68 years)
Elizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator. Her two novels, A Simple Story and Nature and Art, have received particular critical attention. Life Born on 15 October 1753 at Stanningfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Elizabeth was the eighth of the nine children of Mary Simpson and her husband John Simpson , a farmer. The family, like several others in the neighbourhood, was Roman Catholic. Her brother was sent to school, but Elizabeth and her sisters were educated at home.
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Jean Garrigue
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
Jean Garrigue was an American poet. In her lifetime, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for a National Book Award. Life Jean Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus in Evansville, Indiana, to Allan Colfax and Gertrude Garrigus. She was born in 1912 but later gave 1914 as her birth year. She had one sister, Marjorie, and one brother, Ross.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
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Adeline Rittershaus
1876 - 1924 (48 years)
Adeline Rittershaus was a German philologist, a scholar in old Scandinavian literature, and champion for the equality of women. She earned her doctorate in 1898, at the University of Zurich, being one of the first women to do so at that institution, and acquired in 1902, as the first woman, a Venia legendi at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. Her most famous work is a collection of Icelandic folk tales.
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Mary Abigail Dodge
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Mary Abigail Dodge was an American writer and essayist, who wrote under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton. Her writing is noted for its wit and promotion of equality of education and occupation for women. She was an abolitionist.
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Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
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Margaret Wilson
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson was an American novelist. She was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins. Early years and education Born in Traer, Iowa, Wilson grew up on a farm and attended the University of Chicago, earning degrees in 1903 and 1904.
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Catharine Trotter Cockburn
1674 - 1749 (75 years)
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English novelist, dramatist and philosopher who wrote on various subjects, including moral philosophy and theology, and maintained a prolific correspondence. Trotter's writings encompass a wide range of topics, such as necessity, the infinitude of space and substance. However, her primary focus was on moral issues. She believed that moral principles were not inherent but could be discovered by each individual through the use of reason, a faculty bestowed by God. In 1702, she published her first significant philosophical work, titled "A Defence of Mr. Lock's [...
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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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