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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#51
Cleanth Brooks
#1289
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition , argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
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Eugène Ionesco
#325
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State ...
Go to Profile#53
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
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Germaine Greer
#252
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.
Go to Profile#55
Alice Munro
#750
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."
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René Wellek
#1555
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
René Wellek was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite and "fair-minded critic of critics."
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Joseph Brodsky
#629
Overall Influence
1940 - 1996 (56 years)
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad , Soviet Union, in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at Mount Holyoke College, and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 19...
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Donald Keene
#918
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Donald Lawrence Keene was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name . This was also his poetic pen name and occasional nickname, spelled in the ateji form .
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Ian MacDonald
#539
Overall Influence
1948 - 2003 (55 years)
Ian MacCormick was an English music critic, journalist and author, best known for both Revolution in the Head, his critical history of the Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a study of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
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Saul Bellow
#586
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
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Adrienne Rich
#513
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
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Margaret Busby
#1052
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL , also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa , and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Anne Rice
#745
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Anne Rice was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The first book became the subject of a film adaptation—Interview with the Vampire .
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Joyce Carol Oates
#942
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water , What I Lived For , and Blonde , and her short story collections The Wheel of Love and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them , two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize .
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Chinua Achebe
#769
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart , occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah . In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characteriza...
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Stephen Colbert
#98
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is best known for hosting the satirical Comedy Central program The Colbert Report from 2005 to 2014 and the CBS talk program The Late Show with Stephen Colbert since September 2015.
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Carlos Fuentes
#910
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz , Aura , Terra Nostra , The Old Gringo and Christopher Unborn . In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor .
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Terry Pratchett
#515
Overall Influence
1948 - 2015 (67 years)
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for his 41 comic fantasy novels set on the Discworld, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens which he wrote with Neil Gaiman.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#236
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
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A. S. Byatt
#839
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy , known professionally by her former married name, A.S. Byatt , was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
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Simon Reynolds
#433
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Simon Reynolds is an English music journalist and author who began his career at the Melody Maker in the mid-1980s. He subsequently worked as a freelancer and published a number of books on music and popular culture.
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Brian Aldiss
#642
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.
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Michael Moorcock
#861
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael John Moorcock is an English–American writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Elaine Showalter
#1609
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
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Don DeLillo
#1319
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
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M. H. Abrams
#1208
Overall Influence
1912 - 2015 (103 years)
Meyer Howard Abrams , usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams's editorship, The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.
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Douglas Adams
#408
Overall Influence
1952 - 2001 (49 years)
Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
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Bruce Sterling
#426
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.
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Toril Moi
#1601
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Moi is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. As an undergraduate, she attended University of Bergen, where she studied in the Literature Department. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. She lived in Oxford, United Kingdom from 1979 to 1989. Moi lives in North Carolina. She wor...
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Stephen Holden
#523
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Holden is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic. Biography Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually became an A&R executive for RCA Records before turning to writing pop music reviews and related articles for Rolling Stone magazine, Blender, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He first achieved prominence with his 1970s Rolling Stone work, where he tended to cover singer-songwriter and traditional pop artists. He joined the staff of Th...
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William Gibson
#461
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" , and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer .
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John Clute
#1245
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Frederick Clute is a Canadian-born author and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy literature who has lived in both England and the United States since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history" and "perhaps the foremost reader-critic of sf in our time, and one of the best the genre has ever known." He was one of eight people who founded the English magazine Interzone in 1982 .
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Maurice Sendak
#1178
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Maurice Bernard Sendak was an American author and illustrator of children's books. He became most widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.
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Martin Amis
#1268
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money and London Fields . He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize . Amis served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
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Vince Gilligan
#749
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
George Vincent Gilligan Jr. is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. He is known for his television work, specifically as creator, head writer, executive producer, and director of AMC's Breaking Bad and its spin-off prequel series Better Call Saul . He was a writer and producer for The X-Files and was the co-creator of its spin-off, The Lone Gunmen .
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Martin Litchfield West
#1346
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Martin Litchfield West, was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014. West wrote on ancient Greek music, Greek tragedy, Greek lyric poetry, the relations between Greece and the ancient Near East, and the connection between shamanism and early ancient Greek religion, including the Orphic tradition. This work stems from material in Akkadian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Hittite, and Ugaritic, as well as Greek and Latin. West also studied the reconstitution of Indo-European mythology and poetry and its influ...
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Tzvetan Todorov
#1051
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist. He was the author of many books and essays, which have had a significant influence in anthropology, sociology, semiotics, literary theory, intellectual history and culture theory.
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J. D. Salinger
#1119
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Jerome David Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.
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Anthony Powell
#1082
Overall Influence
1905 - 2000 (95 years)
Anthony Dymoke Powell was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in English. Powell's major work has remained in print continuously and has been the subject of television and radio dramatisations. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
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Robert Coover
#2048
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Lowell Coover is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.
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Elie Wiesel
#153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
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J. M. Coetzee
#957
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize , the CNA Literary Award , the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Go to Profile#93
Haruki Murakami
#1113
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
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Max Frisch
#1777
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
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Carol Ann Duffy
#1616
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
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Christopher Hitchens
#269
Overall Influence
1949 - 2011 (62 years)
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics, and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what ca...
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Robert Bly
#1496
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Robert Elwood Bly was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men , which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
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Hunter S. Thompson
#676
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels , a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.
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Clive James
#699
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Clive James was an Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1962 until his death in 2019. He began his career specialising in literary criticism before becoming television critic for The Observer in 1972, where he made his name for his wry, deadpan humour.
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Edward Albee
#458
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , A Delicate Balance , and Three Tall Women . Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.
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