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,
#701
Karl Heinz Bohrer
#15900
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Karl Heinz Bohrer was a German literary scholar and essayist. He worked as chief editor for literature of the daily FAZ, and became co-publisher and author of the cultural magazine Merkur. He taught at the Bielefeld University for decades, and also at Stanford University, California. His autobiography appeared in two volumes in 2012 and 2017. Bohrer is regarded as a disputative intellectual thinker and critic, reflecting his time. He received notable awards for criticism, German language and literature, including the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize and the Heinrich Mann Prize. For his extensive w...
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Kathleen Raine
#5015
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.
Go to Profile#703
William Deresiewicz
#9501
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He is the author of A Jane Austen Education , Excellent Sheep , and The Death of the Artist .
Go to Profile#704
Les Murray
#7487
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Leslie Allan Murray was an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings.
Go to Profile#705
Kelly Link
#17731
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Kelly Link is an American editor and author of short stories. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and realism. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo award, three Nebula awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Go to Profile#706
Christian Bök
#9058
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Christian Bök, FRSC is a Canadian poet known for his experimental works. He is the author of Eunoia, which has won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Life and work He was born "Christian Book", but uses "Bök" as a pseudonym.
Go to Profile#707
Paul Abbott
#6709
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Paul Abbott is an English screenwriter and producer. He became one of the most successful television writers in Britain following his work on popular series such as Cracker and Coronation Street , and would become more widely known for creating some of the most acclaimed television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, including Reckless , Touching Evil , Clocking Off , State of Play , Shameless , and No Offence .
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Mateja Matevski
#23053
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Mateja Matevski was a Macedonian poet, literary and theater critic, essayist, and translator. Career Matevski was born on 13 March 1929 in Istanbul, Turkey to an Albanian family of the Eastern Orthodox rite. His family resided temporarily in Turkey for work. Matevski graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. He worked as a journalist for Macedonian Radio and Television, editor of the cultural and literary programme, editor-in-chief and director of the Television as well as Director General of the Radio Television Skopje. He also held the function of president of the commission for cultural relations abroad and was a member of the presidency of SR Macedonia.
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Nina Berberova
#15007
Overall Influence
1901 - 1993 (92 years)
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of anti-communist Russian refugees in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia. Her 1965 revision of the Constance Garnett translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with Leonard J. Kent is considered the best translation so far by the academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit.
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Philip Levine
#10102
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Philip Levine was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
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Edward Hirsch
#15434
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem , a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Go to Profile#712
Michael Ende
#12578
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German writer of fantasy and children's fiction. He is known for his epic fantasy The Neverending Story ; other well-known works include Momo and Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 35 million copies.
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Andrei Codrescu
#11361
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
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Harry Levin
#13189
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Harry Tuchman Levin was an American literary critic and scholar of both modernism and comparative literature. Life and career Levin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler and Isadore Henry Levin. His family was Jewish. Levin was educated at Harvard University . According to a biographical memoir by Walter Jackson Bate:
Go to Profile#715
Steven Marcus
#15602
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Steven Paul Marcus was an American academic and literary critic who published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography. He was George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#716
David Williamson
#4708
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Keith Williamson is an Australian playwright. He has also written screenplays and teleplays. Early life David Williamson was born in Melbourne, Victoria, on 24 February 1942, and was brought up in Bairnsdale. He initially studied mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne from 1960, but left and graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1965. His early forays into the theatre were as an actor and writer of skits for the Engineers' Revue at Melbourne University's Union Theatre at lunchtime during the early 1960s, and as a satirical sketch writ...
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Mervyn Morris
#17880
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Mervyn Eustace Morris OM is a poet and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. According to educator Ralph Thompson, "In addition to his poetry, which has ranked him among the top West Indian poets, he was one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Morris was Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2014 to 2017.
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Takaaki Yoshimoto
#9128
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
, also known as Ryūmei Yoshimoto, was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic. As a philosopher, he is remembered as a founding figure in the emergence of the New Left in Japan, and as a critic, he was at the forefront of a movement to force writers to confront their responsibility as wartime collaborators.
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Maria Luisa Spaziani
#19196
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Maria Luisa Spaziani was an Italian poet. Biography Spaziani was born in Turin. At nineteen, she founded the review Il dado, working with collaborators such as Vasco Pratolini, Sandro Penna and Vincenzo Ciaffi. Virginia Woolf sent her a chapter of her novel The Waves, autographed to Alla piccola direttrice . Spaziani did not contribute her own poems, however, feeling that they were not of sufficient quality.
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Gerald Early
#5598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gerald Lyn Early is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African-American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Elaine Scarry
#6505
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
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Knut Ahnlund
#9073
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Knut Emil Ahnlund was a Swedish literary historian, writer, and member of the Swedish Academy. Ahnlund, who was born in Stockholm, was an expert on 19th and 20th century Nordic, especially Danish, literature. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Henrik Pontoppidan, and later wrote on Gustav Wied and Sven Lidman, among others. He was also a novelist and published translations of various writers such as Julio Cortázar. He received his doctorate from Stockholm University, and was a professor of Nordic Literary History at the University of Aarhus. He was elected a member of the Swedish Academy ...
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Ken MacLeod
#5292
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. A techno-utopianist, MacLeod's work makes frequent use of libertarian socialist themes; he is a three-time winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award. Prior to becoming a novelist, MacLeod studied biology and worked as a computer programmer. He sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh Science Festival. MacLeod has b...
Go to Profile#724
Simon Gray
#5803
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
Go to Profile#725
Jack Mapanje
#9739
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jack Mapanje is a Malawian writer and poet. He was the head of English at the Chancellor College, the main campus of the University of Malawi before being imprisoned in 1987 for his collection Of Chameleons and Gods, which indirectly criticized the administration of President Hastings Banda. He was released in 1991 and emigrated to the UK, where he worked as a teacher.
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Andreas Huyssen
#8233
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.
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Peter Matthiessen
#8110
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and onetime CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and fiction . He was also a prominent environmental activist.
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Manfred Frank
#6355
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Manfred Frank is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung, has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy." He has also written at length on analytic philosophy and recent French philosophy.
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Jean Shepherd
#5277
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Jean Parker "Shep" Shepherd Jr. was an American storyteller, humorist, radio and TV personality, writer, and actor. With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is known for the film A Christmas Story , which he narrated and co-scripteded, based on his own semiautobiographical stories.
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Michel Tremblay
#3598
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michel Tremblay is a French-Canadian novelist and playwright. Tremblay was born in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up in the French-speaking neighbourhood of Plateau Mont-Royal; at the time of his birth, a neighbourhood with a working-class character and joual dialect - something that would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first professionally produced play, Les Belles-Sœurs, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. It transformed the old guard of Canadian theatre and introduced joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying ...
Go to Profile#732
Ed Sanders
#5068
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Edward Sanders is an American poet, singer, activist, author, publisher and longtime member of the rock band the Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and hippie generations. Sanders is considered to have been active and "present at the counterculture's creation."
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Rafael Lapesa
#11642
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Rafael Lapesa Melgar was a Spanish philologist, a historian of language and of Spanish literature. Early life He was born in Valencia on February 8, 1908. is family moved to Madrid when he was eight. By 1930, he had earned his professorship for his work on the medieval dialect of the western Asturias.
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Franz Karl Stanzel
#12584
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Franz Karl Stanzel was an Austrian literary theorist who specialised in English literature. Academia Born in Molln, Austria, Stanzel finished his degree with Herbert Koziol in Graz. After his habilitation in 1955, he was professor in Göttingen. In 1959, he was offered a position as professor in Erlangen. In 1962, he succeeded Koziol in Graz. He was a professor emeritus of English literature at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.
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Juan Felipe Herrera
#10610
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
Go to Profile#736
Eva Hoffman
#11903
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Eva Hoffman is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic. Early life and education Eva Hoffman was born in Kraków, Poland, shortly after World War II. Her parents, Boris and Maria Wydra, survived the Holocaust by hiding in a forest bunker and then by being hidden by Polish and Ukrainian neighbours. In 1959, at the age of 13, she emigrated with her parents and sister to Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University.
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Apostolos Athanassakis
#23316
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Apostolos N. Athanassakis is a classical scholar, and the former Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Professor Athanassakis, or "Professor A" as he is often referred to by students, served as the faculty in residence in Manzanita Village. Athanassakis taught at UCSB for nearly 30 years in the Classics Department. From 1984 to 1986 he served as head of the Humanities Division at the University of Crete, in Greece.
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Lorrie Moore
#15441
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing. Biography Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. The story, "Raspberries," was published in January 1977. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.
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Anita Desai
#12415
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Anita Desai , born Anita Mazumdar , is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea . Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board...
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Robert Irwin
#10867
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Graham Irwin is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature. Biography Irwin attended Epsom College, read modern history at the University of Oxford, and did graduate research at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the supervision of Bernard Lewis. His thesis was on the Mamluk reconquest of the Crusader states, but he failed to complete it. During his studies, he converted to Islam and spent some time in a dervish monastery in Algeria. From 1972 he was a lecturer in medieval history at the University of St. Andrews. He gave up academic life in 1977 in order to write fiction, while continuing to lecture part-time at Oxford, Cambridge and SOAS.
Go to Profile#741
Bruce Dawe
#11222
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Donald Bruce Dawe was an Australian poet and academic. Some critics consider him one of the most influential Australian poets of all time. Dawe received numerous poetry awards in Australia and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia. He taught literature in universities for over 30 years.
Go to Profile#742
Sara Paretsky
#7107
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski. Life and career Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa. Her father was a microbiologist and moved the family to Kansas in 1951 after taking a job at the University of Kansas, where Paretsky eventually graduated. The family rented an old farm house. Her relationship with her parents was strained; her mother was an alcoholic and her father was a harsh disciplinarian.
Go to Profile#743
J. I. M. Stewart
#11017
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes.
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Lars Gyllensten
#11217
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Lars Johan Wictor Gyllensten was a Swedish author and physician, and a member of the Swedish Academy. Gyllensten was born and grew up in a middle-class family in Stockholm, son of Carl Gyllensten and Ingrid Rangström, and nephew of Ture Rangström. He studied at the Karolinska Institute, becoming a doctor of medicine in 1953, and was an associate professor of histology there from 1955 to 1973.
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Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani
#18219
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani is an Iranian writer, poet, literary critic, editor, and translator. Kadkani was born in Nishapur, Razavi Khorasan. He is currently professor of literature at Tehran University. Shafiei-Kadkani is known for his works on literary criticism and modern Persian poetry.
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Merrill Markoe
#14698
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Merrill Markoe is an American author, television writer, and occasional standup comedian. Early life Markoe was born in New York City. Her family moved several times including stays in Miami, Florida and San Francisco, California. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a B.A. in Art in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. Her first job after leaving the university was teaching art at the University of Southern California.
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Caryl Emerson
#12109
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Emerson was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University from 1988 until her retirement in 2015. From 1980 to 1987 she was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.
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Adam Mansbach
#18590
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Adam Mansbach is an American author. He has previously been a visiting professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program . Biography Mansbach graduated from Columbia College in 1998 and received a MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2000.
Go to Profile#749
James J. Kilpatrick
#7599
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
James Jackson Kilpatrick was an American newspaper journalist, columnist, author, writer and grammarian. During the 1950s and early 1960s he was editor of The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia and encouraged the Massive Resistance strategy to oppose the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. For three decades beginning in the mid-1960s, Kilpatrick wrote a nationally syndicated column "A Conservative View", and sparred for years with liberals Nicholas von Hoffman and later Shana Alexander on the tel...
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Fatos Arapi
#23275
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Fatos Arapi was an Albanian poet, short story writer, translator and journalist. Arapi's publications have been highly praised by his readers and his peers and have been awarded various national and international poetry prizes. In 2008 Arapi became the first Albanian poet to win the Golden Wreath Award .
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