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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#7351
Paul Wendland
1864 - 1915 (51 years)
Paul Wendland was a German classical philologist. Born in Hohenstein, Province of Prussia, he taught as a professor at the Kiel University , Breslau University , Göttingen University . He was co-author of an edition on Philo of Alexandria, "Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt" . With Otto Kern, he published "Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie und Religion" .
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Xu Shoushang
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Xu Shoushang was a Chinese writer. He was one of the co-authors of the Twelve Symbols national emblem in 1912.
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Edward James
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Edward Frank Willis James was a British poet known for his patronage of the surrealist art movement. Early life and marriage James was born on 16 August 1907, the only son of William James and Evelyn Forbes, a Scots socialite. He was reputedly fathered by the Prince of Wales and in his anecdotal reminiscences, recorded in Swans Reflecting Elephants – My Early Years, Edward James also puts forward this hypothesis. In his memoirs he wrote "I was not, I was, in fact, his grandson" saying that it was his grandmother that had an affair with the Prince of Wales. However, there was also popular be...
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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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William Ellery Leonard
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
William Ellery Leonard was an American poet, playwright, translator, and literary scholar. Early life William Ellery Channing Leonard was born on the family homestead in Plainfield, New Jersey on January 25, 1876. His parents, admirers of the transcendentalist movement, named him after William Ellery Channing, a mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father, William James Leonard, was a newspaper editor. However, by 1890, he was unable to financially support his family with this profession. Three years later, he returned to ministry. He accepted an appointment with a Unitarian church in Bolton's Landing, Massachusetts and moved the family there.
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Conrad Bursian
1830 - 1883 (53 years)
Conrad Bursian was a German philologist and archaeologist. Biography He was born at Mutzschen in Saxony. When his parents moved to Leipzig, he received his early education at Thomasschule zu Leipzig. From 1847 to 1851 he was a student at the University of Leipzig, where his instructors included Moritz Haupt and Otto Jahn . He then spent six months in Berlin, where he attended lectures given by Philipp August Böckh . In 1852 he completed his university studies at Leipzig, spending the next three years traveling in Belgium, France, Italy and Greece.
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Branislav Nušić
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Branislav Nušić was a Serbian playwright, satirist, essayist, novelist and founder of modern rhetoric in Serbia. He also worked as a journalist and a civil servant. Life Branislav Nušić was born Alkibijad Nuša in Belgrade on . His father, George Nousias , was a Serbianized Aromanian merchant with family roots in the village of Magarevo in the Ottoman Macedonia, while his mother, Ljubica , was a Serb homemaker from Brčko, Bosnia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule.
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John Barbour
1316 - 1395 (79 years)
John Barbour was a Scottish poet and the first major named literary figure to write in Scots. His principal surviving work is the historical verse romance, The Brus , and his reputation from this poem is such that other long works in Scots which survive from the period are sometimes thought to be by him. He is known to have written a number of other works, but other titles definitely ascribed to his authorship, such as The Stewartis Oryginalle and The Brut , are now lost.
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Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński
1874 - 1941 (67 years)
Tadeusz Kamil Marcjan Żeleński was a Polish stage writer, poet, critic and, above all, the translator of over 100 French literary classics into Polish. He was a pediatrician and gynecologist by profession.
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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
1838 - 1894 (56 years)
<noinclude> </noinclude> Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay CIE was an Indian novelist, poet, essayist and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, written in highly sanskritized Bengali, personifying Bengal as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Ben...
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Franz Susemihl
1826 - 1901 (75 years)
Franz Susemihl was a German classical philologist born in Laage. He studied ancient languages in Leipzig and Berlin, and from 1848 taught classes at the Domgymnasium in Güstrow. In 1852 he received his habilitation at the University of Greifswald, where in 1863 he became a full professor of classical philology. In 1875-76 he was rector at the university.
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Omar Khayyam
1048 - 1131 (83 years)
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī , commonly known as Omar Khayyam , was a polymath, known for his contributions to mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and poetry. He was born in Nishapur, the initial capital of the Seljuk Empire. He lived during the rule of the Seljuk dynasty, around the time of the First Crusade.
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August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben
1798 - 1874 (76 years)
August Heinrich Hoffmann was a German poet. He is best known for writing "", whose third stanza is now the national anthem of Germany, and a number of popular children's songs, considered part of the Young Germany movement.
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Kenneth Slessor
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Kenneth Adolphe Slessor was an Australian poet, journalist and official war correspondent in World War II. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.
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Friedrich Bouterwek
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
Friedrich Ludewig Bouterwek was a German philosopher and critic, born to a mining director at Oker, Electorate of Saxony; today a district of Goslar in Lower Saxony. Life Bouterwek studied law and philology under Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder at the University of Göttingen.
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Uchimura Kanzō
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
Uchimura Kanzō was a Japanese author, Christian evangelist, and the founder of the Nonchurch Movement of Christianity in the Meiji and Taishō period Japan. He is often considered to be the most well-known Japanese pre-World War II pacifist.
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Ling Shuhua
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Ling Shuhua , also known as Su-hua Ling Chen after her marriage, was a Chinese modernist writer and painter whose short stories became popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Her work is characterized by her use of symbolism and boudoir literature.
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Tamara Karsavina
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina was a Russian prima ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. After settling in Britain at Hampstead in London, she began teaching ballet professionally and became recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance-teaching organisation.
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Marie Taglioni
1804 - 1884 (80 years)
Marie Taglioni, Comtesse de Voisins was a Swedish-born ballet dancer of the Romantic ballet era partially of Italian descent, a central figure in the history of European dance. She spent most of her life in the Austrian Empire and France. She was one of the most celebrated ballerinas of the romantic ballet, which was cultivated primarily at Her Majesty's Theatre in London and at the Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique of the Paris Opera Ballet. She is credited with being the first ballerina to truly dance en pointe.
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Lynn Riggs
1899 - 1954 (55 years)
Rollie Lynn Riggs was an American author, poet, playwright and screenwriter. His 1931 play Green Grow The Lilacs was adapted into the landmark 1943 musical Oklahoma!. Early life Riggs was born on a farm near Claremore, Oklahoma, . His mother was 1/8 Cherokee, and when he was two years old, his mother secured his Cherokee allotment for him. He was able to draw on his allotment to help support his writing.
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Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC was an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig member of Parliament from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative from 1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859, choosing Richard Clement Moody as founder of British Columbia. He declined the Crown of Greece in 1862 after King Otto abdicated. He was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866.
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Gustav Gröber
1844 - 1911 (67 years)
Gustav Gröber was a German Romance philologist. He received his education at Leipzig, taught at Zurich , and later became professor at Breslau and the University of Strassburg. His principal work was in Romance literature and linguistics. His student, Ernst Curtius, dedicated his classic study, “ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages” to Gröber.
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Johan Ludvig Heiberg
1791 - 1860 (69 years)
Johan Ludvig Heiberg , Danish poet, playwright, literary critic, literary historian son of the political writer Peter Andreas Heiberg , and of the novelist, afterwards the Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, was born in Copenhagen. He promoted Hegelian philosophy and introduced vaudeville to Denmark.
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Volodymyr Vynnychenko
1880 - 1951 (71 years)
Volodymyr Kyrylovych Vynnychenko was a Ukrainian statesman, political activist, writer, playwright and artist who served as the first prime minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic. As a writer, Vynnychenko is recognized in Ukrainian literature as a leading modernist writer in pre-revolutionary Ukraine, who wrote short stories, novels, and plays, but in Soviet Ukraine his works were forbidden, like that of many other Ukrainian writers, from the 1930s until the mid-1980s. Prior to his entry onto the stage of Ukrainian politics, he was a long-time political activist, who lived abroad in Western Europe from 1906 to 1914.
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Jim Thompson
1906 - 1977 (71 years)
James Myers Thompson was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications, published from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice—notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times—he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow. In the late 1980s, several of his novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
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Paul Elmer More
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Paul Elmer More was an American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist. Biography Paul Elmer More, the son of Enoch Anson and Katherine Hay Elmer, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University. More taught Sanskrit at Harvard and Bryn Mawr .
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Max Hayward
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Harry Maxwell "Max" Hayward was a British lecturer on and translator of Russian literature. He has been described as "the best and most prolific translator of Russian prose into English since Constance Garnett".
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Theodor Benfey
1809 - 1881 (72 years)
This is about the German philologist. For Theodor Benfey who developed a spiral periodic table of the elements in 1964, see Otto Theodor Benfey. Theodor Benfey was a German philologist and scholar of Sanskrit. His works, particularly his Sanskrit-English dictionary, formed a major contribution to Sanskrit studies.
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Millen Brand
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Millen Brand was an American writer and poet. His novels, The Outward Room and Savage Sleep , addressed mental health institutions and were bestsellers in their day. Personal life Brand was born on January 19, 1906, in Jersey City, New Jersey, into a working-class family. His father was an electrician working freelance and his mother was a nurse. His maternal grandfather was a carpenter and his paternal grandfather was a farmer. Brand's father bought a farm in 1906 and Millen enjoyed doing chores on the farm and stopped going to the local school. He and his parents moved back to the city after a few years because farming was not financially viable.
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John Marston
1576 - 1634 (58 years)
John Marston was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted only a decade. His work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary.
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Bliss Carman
1861 - 1929 (68 years)
William Bliss Carman was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years. In Canada, Carman is classed as one of the Confederation Poets, a group which also included Charles G.D. Roberts , Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. "Of the group, Carman had the surest lyric touch and achieved the widest international recognition. But unlike others, he never attempted to secure his income by novel writing, popular journalism, or non-literary employment. He remained a poe...
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William Gardner Hale
1849 - 1928 (79 years)
William Gardner Hale was an American classical scholar. Biography William Gardner Hale was born in Savannah, Georgia to a resident New England family. He was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874–1876; studied classical philology at Leipzig and Göttingen in 1876–1877; was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to 1880, and succeeding Tracy Peck as professor of Latin in Cornell University from 1880 to 1892, when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department of the University of Chicago.
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Frederick Marryat
1792 - 1848 (56 years)
Captain Frederick Marryat was a Royal Navy officer, a novelist, and an acquaintance of Charles Dickens. He is noted today as an early pioneer of nautical fiction, particularly for his semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy . He is remembered also for his children's novel The Children of the New Forest , and for a widely used system of maritime flag signalling known as Marryat's Code.
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