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 people in Literature,
#7301
Wang Yi
85 - Present (1941 years)
Wang Yi , courtesy name Shushi , was a Chinese anthologist, librarian, and poet during the Eastern Han dynasty who was employed in the Imperial Library by the Later Han emperor Shun Di . Wang Yi is known for his work on the poetry anthology Chu Ci. Although with varying reliability, his commentaries on this work are a main source of information regarding some of its often obscure textual references.
Go to Profile#7302
Matthias Bel
1684 - 1749 (65 years)
Matthias Bel or Matthias Bél was a Lutheran pastor and polymath from the Kingdom of Hungary. Bel was active in the fields of pedagogy, philosophy, philology, history, and theoretical theology; he was the founder of Hungarian geographic science and a pioneer of descriptive ethnography and economy. A leading figure in pietism. He is also known as the Great Ornament of Hungary .
Go to Profile#7303
Wilhelm Peters
1815 - 1883 (68 years)
Wilhelm Karl Hartwich Peters was a German naturalist and explorer. He was assistant to the anatomist Johannes Peter Müller and later became curator of the Berlin Zoological Museum. Encouraged by Müller and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Peters travelled to Mozambique via Angola in September 1842, exploring the coastal region and the Zambesi River. He returned to Berlin with an enormous collection of natural history specimens, which he then described in Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique... in den Jahren 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt . The work was comprehensive in its coverage, dealing with mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, river fish, insects and botany.
Go to Profile#7304
Danilo Kiš
1935 - 1989 (54 years)
Danilo Kiš was a Serbian novelist, short story writer, essayist and translator. His best known works include Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead. Life and work Early life Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia . Kiš was the son of Eduard Kiš , a Hungarian-speaking Jewish railway inspector and Milica , a Montenegrin Serb from Cetinje. His father was born in Austria-Hungary with the surname Kohn, but changed it to Kis as part of Magyarization, a widely implemented practice at the time. Kiš's parents met in 1930 in Subotica and married the following year.
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Maurice Maeterlinck
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck , also known as Count Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations". The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.
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Kōnosuke Hinatsu
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Kōnosuke Hinatsu was the pen-name of a Japanese poet known for his romantic and gothic poetry patterned after English literature. His real name was Kunito Higuchi. Biography A native of what is now part of Iida city in Nagano prefecture, Hinatsu graduated from Waseda University, and was later a professor of English literature at Waseda. He was influenced by the works of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, and the Japanese writers Yukio Mishima and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. His specialty was the translation of romantic and gothic poetry from English into Japanese. Always in poor health, and a fervent R...
Go to Profile#7307
Wang Xizhi
303 - 361 (58 years)
Wang Xizhi was a Chinese politician and writer from the Jin dynasty who is known for his mastery of Chinese calligraphy. Wang is often regarded as the greatest calligrapher in Chinese history. He was a master of all forms of Chinese calligraphy, especially the running script. Emperor Taizong of Tang admired his works so much that Wang's work, the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion was said to be buried with the emperor in his mausoleum.
Go to Profile#7308
Ben Jonson
1572 - 1637 (65 years)
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour , Volpone, or The Fox , The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
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Stringfellow Barr
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Stringfellow Barr was a historian, author, and former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he, together with Scott Buchanan, instituted the Great Books curriculum. Career Barr was the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review from 1931 to 1937. He established and was president of the Foundation for World Government from 1948 to 1958. In the 1950s he taught classics at Rutgers University.
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Tomoji Abe
1903 - 1973 (70 years)
was a Japanese novelist, social critic, humanist, and translator of English and American literature. Although he began writing as a modernist, in his later works he represented the intellectual movement in Japanese literature. This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind ; it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan . Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Shō...
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Zenta Mauriņa
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Zenta Mauriņa was a Latvian writer, essayist, translator, and researcher in philology. She was married to the Electronic Voice Phenomena researcher Konstantin Raudive. Biography Born to doctor Roberts Mauriņš, Zenta spent her childhood in Grobiņa, where, at the age of six, she contracted polio, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. After studying at the Russian girl's high school in Liepaja , she studied philosophy at the Latvian University in Riga . After this, she studied philology of Baltic languages . She taught at the Latvian Teachers Institute and at the Latvian...
Go to Profile#7312
Frances Burney
1752 - 1840 (88 years)
Frances Burney , also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina , was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime.
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Wincenty Pol
1807 - 1872 (65 years)
Wincenty Pol was a Polish poet and geographer. Life Pol was born in Lublin , to Franz Pohl , a German in the Austrian service, and his wife Eleonora Longchamps de Berier, from a French family living in Poland. Pol fought in the Polish army in the November 1830 Uprising and participated in the 1848 revolution. In spite of his mixed family background, he considered himself a Pole, so much so that he changed his surname to Pol.
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Mário de Andrade
1893 - 1945 (52 years)
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. He wrote one of the first and most influential collections of modern Brazilian poetry, Paulicéia Desvairada , published in 1922. He has had considerable influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.
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John Evelyn
1620 - 1706 (86 years)
John Evelyn was an English writer, landowner, gardener, courtier and minor government official, who is now best known as a diarist. He was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. John Evelyn's diary, or memoir, spanned the period of his adult life from 1640, when he was a student, to 1706, the year he died. He did not write daily at all times. The many volumes provide insight into life and events at a time before regular magazines or newspapers were published, making diaries of greater interest to modern historians than such works might have been at later periods. Evelyn's work covers art, ...
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Matija Čop
1797 - 1835 (38 years)
Matija Čop , also known in German as Matthias Tschop, was a Slovene linguist, polyglot, literary historian and critic. Biography Čop was born in the small northern Carniolan town of Žirovnica, in what was then the Habsburg monarchy , into a relatively wealthy peasant family. He was sent to Ljubljana for primary and secondary schooling and then studied philosophy at the lyceums of Ljubljana and Vienna for three years. In 1817, he returned from Vienna and attended a priest seminary until 1820, when he left it to become a secondary school teacher in Rijeka, Croatia. In 1822 he moved to Lviv , whe...
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Charles Wharton Stork
1881 - 1971 (90 years)
Charles Wharton Stork was an American literary author, poet, and translator. Early life and education Stork was born in Philadelphia on February 12, 1881 to Theophilus Baker and Hannah Stork. He graduated from Haverford College and Harvard University.
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Anagarika Dharmapala
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Anagārika Dharmapāla was a Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist and a writer. Anagarika Dharmapāla is noted because he was:the first global Buddhist missionaryone of the founding contributors of non-violent Sinhalese Buddhist nationalisma leading figure in the Sri Lankan independence movement against British rulea pioneer in the revival of Buddhism in India after it had been virtually extinct for several centuriesthe first Buddhist in modern times to preach the Dhamma in three continents: Asia, North America, and Europe.Along with Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, the creators of the Theosop...
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Walter Besant
1836 - 1901 (65 years)
Sir Walter Besant was an English novelist and historian. William Henry Besant was his brother, and another brother, Frank, was the husband of Annie Besant. Early life and education The son of wine merchant William Besant , he was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire and attended school at St Paul's, Southsea, Stockwell Grammar, London and King's College London. In 1855, he was admitted as a pensioner to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1859 as 18th wrangler.
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Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon
1675 - 1755 (80 years)
Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, GE , was a French soldier, diplomat, and memoirist. He was born in Paris at the Hôtel Selvois, 6 rue Taranne . The family's ducal peerage , granted in 1635 to his father Claude de Rouvroy , served as both perspective and theme in Saint-Simon's life and writings. He was the second and last Duke of Saint-Simon.
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Eugenio d'Ors
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
Eugenio d'Ors Rovira was a Spanish writer, essayist, journalist, philosopher and art critic. He wrote in both Catalan and Spanish, sometimes under the pseudonym of Xènius . Biography Born in Barcelona in 1882, Eugenio d'Ors initiated himself in the modernist literary environments. He participated in his younger years, between nineteen and twenty-five years, in this aesthetic. He studied law in Barcelona and received his PhD degree in Madrid.
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Friedrich Kluge
1856 - 1926 (70 years)
Friedrich Kluge was a German philologist and educator. He is known for the Etymological Dictionary of the German Language , which was first published in 1883. Biography Kluge was born in Cologne. He studied comparative linguistics and classical and modern philologies at the universities of Leipzig, Strasbourg and Freiburg. As a student, his instructors were August Leskien, Georg Curtius, Friedrich Zarncke and Rudolf Hildebrand at Leipzig and Heinrich Hübschmann, Bernhard ten Brink and Erich Schmidt at the University of Strasbourg.
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William Davenant
1606 - 1668 (62 years)
Sir William Davenant , also spelled D'Avenant, was an English poet and playwright. Along with Thomas Killigrew, Davenant was one of the rare figures in English Renaissance theatre whose career spanned both the Caroline and Restoration eras and who was active both before and after the English Civil War and during the Interregnum.
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Vayalar Ramavarma
1928 - 1975 (47 years)
Vayalar Ramavarma , also known as Vayalar, was an Indian poet and lyricist of Malayalam language. He was known for his poems which include Sargasangeetham, Mulankaadu, Padamudrakal, Aayisha and Oru Judas janikkunnu and for around 1300 songs he penned for 256 Malayalam films. He received the National Film Award for Best Lyrics in 1972 and was the winner of the Kerala State Film Award for Best Lyrics in its year of inception which he received three more times. He was also a recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1962. His collaborations with G. Devarajan produced the golden ...
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Cornelius Ryan
1920 - 1974 (54 years)
Cornelius Ryan was an Irish journalist and author known mainly for writing popular military history. He was especially known for his histories of World War II events: The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day , The Last Battle , and A Bridge Too Far .
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Erich Schmidt
1853 - 1913 (60 years)
Erich Schmidt was a German historian of literature. Biography He was the son of a zoologist Oskar Schmidt. He studied Germanic philology and literary history at Graz, Jena, and Strassburg, established himself as privatdozent at Würzburg in 1875, became a professor at Strassburg in 1877, at Vienna in 1880, and director of the Goethe archive at Weimar in 1885. Thence he was called to Berlin in 1887, to succeed Wilhelm Scherer in the chair of German language and literature. From 1907 onward, he served as president of the Goethe Society.
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Kuriyagawa Hakuson
1880 - 1923 (43 years)
Kuriyagawa Hakuson was the pen-name of a Japanese literary critic, active in Taishō period Japan. His real name was Kuriyagawa Tatsuo. Early life Kuriyagawa Hakuson was born in Kyoto. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, where he had studied under Koizumi Yakumo and Natsume Sōseki, and later became a professor at Kumamoto University and Kyoto Imperial University. He lectured on 19th century Western literature, and criticized traditional Japanese writing on naturalism and romanticism. His writings include: Kindai bungaku jikko , Zoge no to o dete and Kindai no ren-aikan .
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Horatio Alger
1832 - 1899 (67 years)
Horatio Alger Jr. was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to middle-class security and comfort through good works. His writings were characterized by the "rags-to-riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on the United States from 1868 through to his death in 1899.
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Ban Gu
32 - 92 (60 years)
Ban Gu was a Chinese historian, poet, and politician best known for his part in compiling the Book of Han, the second of China's 24 dynastic histories. He also wrote a number of fu, a major literary form, part prose and part poetry, which is particularly associated with the Han era. A number of Ban's fu were collected by Xiao Tong in the Wen Xuan.
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Marko Marulić
1450 - 1524 (74 years)
Marko Marulić Splićanin , in Latin Marcus Marulus Spalatensis , was a Croatian poet, lawyer, judge, and Renaissance humanist who coined the term "psychology". He is the national poet of Croatia. According to George J. Gutsche, Marulic's epic poem Judita "is the first long poem in Croatian", and "gives Marulić a position in his own literature comparable to Dante in Italian literature." Furthermore, Marulić's Latin poetry is of such high quality that his contemporaries dubbed him "The Christian Virgil."
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John Landquist
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
John Landquist was a Swedish literary critic, literary scholar, writer and professor of pedagogy and psychology at Lund University from 1936 to 1946. When Landquist studied at Uppsala University, he was a member of the student organization Les quatre diables together with Sven Lidman, Sigurd Agrell and Harald Brising. Landquist was engaged in Strindbergsfejden and released August Strindberg's works. In 1916 he wrote a monograph on Gustaf Fröding and was ready to introduce Sigmund Freud's theory of manners into Swedish literary history. He also translated Freud's works into Swedish.
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Wilhelm Braune
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Theodor Wilhelm Braune was a German philologist and Germanist. Biography In 1869 Braune entered the University of Leipzig, where he was approved as an instructor in 1874. In 1877 he was appointed as extraordinary professor at the University of Giessen and became an ordinary professor of German language and literature there in 1880. He later served as a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He is an important representative of the Neogrammarians.
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Lady Caroline Lamb
1785 - 1828 (43 years)
Lady Caroline Lamb was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for Glenarvon, a Gothic novel. In 1812, she had an affair with Lord Byron, whom she described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Her husband was the Honourable William Lamb, who after her death became 2nd Viscount Melbourne and British prime minister.
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Osip Bodyansky
1808 - 1877 (69 years)
Osip Maksimovich Bodyansky was a notable Russian Imperial Slavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent who studied and taught at the Imperial Moscow University. Bodyansky's close friends included Nikolai Gogol, Sergey Aksakov, Mikhail Katkov, Taras Shevchenko, Mikhail Maksimovich and Pavel Jozef Šafárik. He was elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1854.
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E. V. Gordon
1896 - 1938 (42 years)
Eric Valentine Gordon was a Canadian philologist, known as an editor of medieval Germanic texts and a teacher of medieval Germanic languages at the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester.
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Ludwig Preller
1809 - 1861 (52 years)
Ludwig Preller was a German philologist and antiquarian. Biography Born in Hamburg, he studied at Leipzig, Berlin and Göttingen, in 1838 he was appointed to the professorship of philology at the University of Dorpat, which, however, he resigned in 1843. He afterwards spent some time in Italy, but settled in Jena in 1844, where he became professor in 1846. In 1847 he relocated as head librarian to Weimar.
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Paul Gallico
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Paul William Gallico was an American novelist and short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his most critically successful book, for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation, and for four novels about the beloved character of Mrs. Harris.
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Franz Bücheler
1837 - 1908 (71 years)
Franz Bücheler was a German classical scholar, was born in Rheinberg, and educated at Bonn, where he was a student of Friedrich Ritschl . Biography In 1856 Bücheler graduated from the University of Bonn with a dissertation on linguistic studies of the Emperor Claudius. He held professorships successively at Freiburg , Greifswald , and Bonn . At Bonn, he worked closely with Hermann Usener .
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Kōda Rohan
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
, pen name , was a Japanese author. His daughter, Aya Kōda, was also a noted author who often wrote about him. Kōda wrote "The Icon of Liberty", also known as "The Buddha of Art" or "The Elegant Buddha", in 1889. A house in which Kōda lived was rebuilt in 1972 by the Meiji Mura museum. Kōda was one of the first persons to be awarded the Order of Culture when it was established in 1937.
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Dino Buzzati
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Dino Buzzati-Traverso was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel The Tartar Steppe, although he is also known for his well-received collections of short stories.
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Pyotr Veinberg
1831 - 1908 (77 years)
Pyotr Isaevich Veinberg was a Russian poet, translator, journalist and literary historian. Biography Pyotr Veinberg was born in Mykolaiv to the family of a notary. After studying in the Odessa gymnasium and Richelieu's lyceum he joined Kharkov University's history and philology faculty, from which he graduated in 1854. For the next three years he was working in Tambov as a local governor's aide, editing the Tambov Governorate News newspaper’s unofficial section. One of his first poems, "He was a titular councillor" , was an autobiographical one and dealt with his own unrequited love for the governor's daughter.
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William Harrison Ainsworth
1805 - 1882 (77 years)
William Harrison Ainsworth was an English historical novelist born at King Street in Manchester. He trained as a lawyer, but the legal profession held no attraction for him. While completing his legal studies in London he met the publisher John Ebers, at that time manager of the King's Theatre, Haymarket. Ebers introduced Ainsworth to literary and dramatic circles, and to his daughter, who became Ainsworth's wife.
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Paul Shorey
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Paul Shorey Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. was an American classical scholar. Biography Shorey was born at Davenport, Iowa. After graduating from Harvard in 1878, he studied in Europe at Leipzig, Bonn, Athens, and Munich . He was a professor at several institutions from 1885 onward. Professor Shorey served at Bryn Mawr College , then principally at the University of Chicago. In 1901-02 he was professor in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, and in 1913-14 he was Roosevelt Lecturer in the University of Berlin. Professor Shorey was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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Allan Cunningham
1784 - 1842 (58 years)
Allan Cunningham was a Scottish poet and author. Life He was born at Keir, near Dalswinton, Dumfries and Galloway, and first worked as a stonemason's apprentice. His father was a neighbour of Robert Burns at Ellisland, and Allan with his brother James visited James Hogg, the "Ettrick shepherd", who became a friend to both. Cunningham's other brothers were the naval surgeon Peter Miller Cunningham and the poet, Thomas Mounsey Cunningham .
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Guillermo Blest Gana
1829 - 1904 (75 years)
Guillermo Blest Gana was a Chilean writer, usually considered one of his country's leading exponents of Romantic literature. Biography Guillermo Blest Gana was born in Santiago in 1829, the son of Chilean aristocrat María de la Luz Gana López and Anglo-Irish doctor William Cunningham Blest, one of the pioneers of the modernization of medicine in Chile in the first half of the 19th century. Carlos Orrego Luco described Guillermo as follows:
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Rasmus B. Anderson
1846 - 1936 (90 years)
Rasmus Bjørn Anderson was an American author, professor, editor, businessman and diplomat. He brought to popular attention the fact that Viking explorers were the first Europeans to arrive in the New World and was the originator of Leif Erikson Day.
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Baroness Orczy
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Baroness Emma Orczy , usually known as Baroness Orczy or to her family and friends as Emmuska Orczy, was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save French aristocrats from "Madame Guillotine" during the French Revolution, establishing the "hero with a secret identity" in popular culture.
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Ludwig Lewisohn
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Ludwig Lewisohn was a novelist, literary critic, the drama critic for The Nation and then its associate editor. He was the editor of the New Palestine, an American Zionist journal. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Ohio State University as well as serving as professor of German and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. Lewisohn produced some 40 full-length fiction and non-fiction books, nearly as many translations, wrote numerous magazine and journal articles and edited countless other written works.
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Eduard Norden
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Eduard Norden was a German classical philologist and historian of religion. When Norden received an honorary doctorate from Harvard, James Bryant Conant referred to him as "the most famous Latinist in the world".
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A. H. Tammsaare
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Anton Hansen , better known by his pseudonym A. H. Tammsaare and its variants, was an Estonian writer whose pentalogy Truth and Justice is considered one of the major works of Estonian literature and "The Estonian Novel".
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