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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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#7401

Chen Hengzhe

1890 - 1976 (86 years)

Chen Hengzhe , pen name Sophia H. Z. Chen , was a pioneering writer in modern vernacular Chinese literature, a leader in the New Culture Movement, and the first female professor at a Chinese university. Chen is known for aiming to educate Chinese people by incorporating values from both Western culture and Chinese culture, producing many works reflecting these values.

#7402

Pietro Bembo

1470 - 1547 (77 years)

Pietro Bembo, was an Italian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance , Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a standard language, became the modern Italian language. In the 16th century, Bembo's poetry, essays and books proved basic to reviving interest in the literary works of Petrarch. In the field of music, Bembo's literary writing techniques ...

#7403

Kamini Roy

1864 - 1933 (69 years)

Kamini Roy was a Bengali poet, social worker and feminist in British India. She was the first woman honours graduate in British India. Early life Born on 12 October 1864 in the village of Basunda, then in Bakerganj District of Bengal Presidency and now in Jhalokati District of Bangladesh, Roy joined Bethune School in 1883. One of the first girls to attend school in British India, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Sanskrit honours from Bethune College of the University of Calcutta in 1886 and started teaching there in the same year. Kadambini Ganguly, the country's second female honour...

#7404

Oscar Micheaux

1884 - 1951 (67 years)

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux Early life and education Micheaux was born on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, on January 2, 1884. He was the fifth child born to Calvin S. and Belle Michaux, who had a total of 13 children. In his later years, Micheaux added an "e" to his last name. His father was born a slave in Kentucky. Because of his surname, his father's family appears to have been enslaved by French-descended settlers. French Huguenot refugees had settled in Virginia in 1700; their descendants took slaves west when they migrated into Kentucky after the American Revolutionary War.

#7405

Helen Gardner

1908 - 1986 (78 years)

Dame Helen Louise Gardner, was an English literary critic and academic. Gardner began her teaching career at the University of Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1975 was a Merton Professor of English Literature, the first woman to have that position. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot, but also published on John Milton and William Shakespeare. She published over a dozen books, and received multiple honours.

#7406

Atsushi Nakajima

Atsushi Nakajima

1909 - 1942 (33 years)

Atsushi Nakajima was a Japanese author known for his unique style and self-introspective themes. His major works include "The Moon Over the Mountain" and "Light, Wind and Dreams" with the former being published in many Japanese textbooks.

#7407

André Chénier

1762 - 1794 (32 years)

André Marie Chénier was a French poet of Greek and Franco-Levantine origin, associated with the events of the French Revolution of which he was a victim. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for supposed "crimes against the state", just three days before the end of the Reign of Terror. Chénier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and other works of art.

#7408

Richard Livingstone

1880 - 1960 (80 years)

Sir Richard Winn Livingstone was a British classical scholar, educationist, and academic administrator. He promoted the classical liberal arts. Life Livingstone was born on 23 January 1880 in Liverpool. His father was an Anglican vicar; his mother the daughter of an Irish baron. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He remained at the University of Oxford until 1924 as fellow, tutor, and librarian at Corpus Christi College. In 1920, he served on the Prime Minister's committee on the classics. During 1920–22, he was co-editor of the Classical Review.

#7409

Andreas Heusler

1865 - 1940 (75 years)

Andreas Heusler was a Swiss philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. He was a Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Berlin and a renowned authority on early Germanic literature.

#7410

Mokichi Saitō

1882 - 1953 (71 years)

Mokichi Saitō was a Japanese poet of the Taishō period, a member of the Araragi school of tanka, and a psychiatrist. Mokichi was born in the village of Kanakame, now part of Kaminoyama, Yamagata in 1882. He attended Tokyo Imperial University Medical School and, upon graduation in 1911, joined the staff of Sugamo Hospital where he began his study of psychiatry. He later directed Aoyama Hospital, a psychiatric facility.

#7411

Ovid Densusianu

Ovid Densusianu

1873 - 1938 (65 years)

Ovid Densusianu was a Romanian poet, philologist, linguist, folklorist, literary historian and critic, chief of a poetry school, university professor and journalist. He is known for introducing new trends of European modernism into Romanian literature.

#7412

Roger Ascham

1515 - 1568 (53 years)

Roger Ascham was an English scholar and didactic writer, famous for his prose style, his promotion of the vernacular, and his theories of education. He served in the administrations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, having earlier acted as Elizabeth's tutor in Greek and Latin between 1548 and 1550.

#7413

Paul Green

1894 - 1981 (87 years)

Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright whose work includes historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.

#7414

George Ticknor

1791 - 1871 (80 years)

George Ticknor was an American academician and Hispanist, specializing in the subject areas of languages and literature. He is known for his scholarly work on the history and criticism of Spanish literature.

#7415

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham

1628 - 1687 (59 years)

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 20th Baron de Ros, was an English statesman and poet who exerted considerable political power during the reign of Charles II of England. A Royalist during the English Civil War, in 1651 he joined Charles II's court-in-exile in France. He returned to England in 1657 after a disagreement with the king, but subsequently supported the Stuart Restoration in 1660. Buckingham was imprisoned by Charles on several occasions before rising to be one of his most influential advisors, becoming a key member of the Cabal ministry in 1668. In 1674 he was dismissed an...

#7416

Wu Cheng'en

1500 - 1582 (82 years)

Wu Cheng'en , courtesy name Ruzhong , was a Chinese novelist, poet, and politician during the Ming dynasty. He is considered by many to be the author of Journey to the West, one of the Classic Chinese Novels.

#7417

Alfred Noyes

1880 - 1958 (78 years)

Alfred Noyes CBE was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright. Early years Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Aberystwyth, Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek. The Welsh coast and mountains were an inspiration to Noyes.

#7418

Arthur Wing Pinero

Arthur Wing Pinero

1855 - 1934 (79 years)

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright and, early in his career, actor. Pinero was drawn to the theatre from an early age, and became a professional actor at the age of 19. He gained experience as a supporting actor in British provincial theatres, and from 1876 to 1881 was a member of Henry Irving's company, based at the Lyceum Theatre, London.

#7419

Johannes Trithemius

Johannes Trithemius

1462 - 1516 (54 years)

Johannes Trithemius , born Johann Heidenberg, was a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath who was active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and occultist. He is considered the founder of modern cryptography and steganography, as well as the founder of bibliography and literary studies as branches of knowledge. He had considerable influence on the development of early modern and modern occultism. His students included Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus.

#7420

Thomas Otway

1652 - 1685 (33 years)

Thomas Otway was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd . Life Otway was born at Trotton near Midhurst, the parish of which his father, Humphrey Otway, was at that time curate. Humphrey later became rector of Woolbeding, a neighbouring parish, where Thomas Otway was brought up and expected to commit to priesthood. He was educated at Winchester College, and in 1669 entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner, but left the university without a degree in the autumn of 1672. At Oxford he made the acquaintance of Anthony Cary, 5th Vis...

#7421

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

1867 - 1928 (61 years)

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a journalist, politician and bestselling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films that were adapted from his works.

#7422

Édouard Schuré

1841 - 1929 (88 years)

Eduard Schuré was a French philosopher, poet, playwright, novelist, music critic, and publicist of esoteric literature. Biography Schuré was the son of a doctor in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg, who died when Édouard was fourteen years old. Schuré mastered French as well as German, and was influenced by German and French culture in his formative years. He received his degree in law at the University of Strasbourg, but he never entered into practice. Schuré called the three most significant of his friendships those with Richard Wagner, Marguerita Albana Mignaty and Rudolf Steiner.

#7423

Juan Andrés

1740 - 1817 (77 years)

Juan Andrés y Morell was a Spanish Jesuit priest, Christian humanist and literary critic of the Age of Enlightenment. He was the creator of world history and comparative literature through the most important and extensive of his works: Dell'Origine, progressi e stato d'ogni attuale letteratura – Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura only recently restored to a critical and complete edition. He is one of the most important authors, together with Lorenzo Hervás, Antonio Eximeno, Francisco Javier Clavijero or Celestino Mutis, of the Spanish Universalist School of the 18th ce...

#7424

Thomas MacDonagh

Thomas MacDonagh

1878 - 1916 (38 years)

Thomas Stanislaus MacDonagh was an Irish political activist, poet, playwright, educationalist and revolutionary leader. He was one of the seven leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916, a signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and Commandant of the 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, which fought in Jacob's biscuit factory. He was executed for his part in the Rising at the age of thirty-eight.

#7425

Lewis Richard Farnell

1856 - 1934 (78 years)

Lewis Richard Farnell FBA was a classical scholar and Oxford academic, where he served as Vice-Chancellor from 1920 to 1923. Early life and career Lewis Farnell was born in Salisbury, southern England, in 1856. He was educated at the City of London School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first class degree in Literae Humaniores in 1878. He was elected as a Fellow of Exeter College in 1880 and a lecturer in classics in 1883. He was later Rector of the College.

#7426

Harold H. Bender

1882 - 1951 (69 years)

Harold Herman Bender was an American philologist who taught for more than forty years at Princeton University, where he served as chair of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature. He was the chief etymologist for Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

#7427

János Garay

1812 - 1853 (41 years)

János Garay was a Hungarian poet and author, born in Szekszárd, Tolna County. From 1823 to 1828 he studied at Pécs, and subsequently, in 1829, at the University of Pest. In 1834 he brought out an heroic poem, in hexameters, under the title Csatár. Garay was an energetic journalist, and in 1838 he moved to Pozsony, where he edited the political journal Hírnök . He returned to Pest in 1839, when he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1842 he was admitted into the Kisfaludy Society, of which he became second secretary.

#7428

Xu Zhimo

1897 - 1931 (34 years)

Xu Zhimo was a Chinese romantic poet and writer of modern Chinese poetry who strove to loosen Chinese poetry from its traditional forms and to reshape it under the influences of Western poetry and the vernacular Chinese language. He died in a plane crash.

#7429

Gladys Mitchell

1901 - 1983 (82 years)

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell was an English writer best known for her creation of Mrs Bradley, the heroine of 66 detective novels. She also wrote under the pseudonyms Stephen Hockaby and Malcolm Torrie. Fêted during her life , her work has been largely neglected in the decades since her death.

#7430

D. H. Lawrence

1885 - 1930 (45 years)

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Several of his novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of sexuality and use of explicit language.

#7431

Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern

Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern

1770 - 1852 (82 years)

Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern was a German philologist in Livonia, the first director of the library of the Imperial University of Dorpat. He coined the term Bildungsroman. Biography Morgenstern was born in Magdeburg. He studied at the University of Halle under Johann August Eberhard in philosophy and Friedrich August Wolf in philology.

#7432

Patras Bokhari

1898 - 1958 (60 years)

Syed Ahmed Shah , commonly known as Patras Bokhari , was a Pakistani humorist, writer, broadcaster and diplomat who served as a Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. Born in Peshawar, British India to a Kashmiri family, Shah studied at Edwardes Mission School in Peshawar and moved to Lahore where he studied English literature at the Government College. Shah moved to United Kingdom where he received his Tripos from the Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He returned to Lahore where he taught English at Government College in 1927. He became a prominent part of the Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia.

#7433

Joaquin Miller

1837 - 1913 (76 years)

Cincinnatus Heine Miller , better known by his pen name Joaquin Miller , was an American poet, author, and frontiersman. He is nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras" after the Sierra Nevada, about which he wrote in his Songs of the Sierras .

#7434

Austin App

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Austin Joseph App was an American professor of medieval English literature who taught at the University of Scranton and La Salle University. App defended Nazi Germany during World War II. He is known for his work denying the Holocaust, and he has been called the first major American Holocaust denier.

#7435

Mihai Beniuc

1907 - 1988 (81 years)

Mihai Beniuc was a Romanian socialist realist poet, dramatist, and novelist. He was born in 1907 in Sebiș, Arad County , and attended the Moise Nicoară High School in Arad. In 1931 he graduated from the University of Cluj, majoring in psychology, philosophy and sociology. This was reflected in his writing, particularly in his novels. At the end of World War II, he joined the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Cluj.

#7436

Johannes Scherr

Johannes Scherr

1817 - 1886 (69 years)

Johannes Scherr was a German-born cultural historian, writer, literary critic, educator and politician who spent most of his working life in Switzerland. Biography Scherr was born in Hohenrechberg , Württemberg on October 1817. After studying philosophy and history at the University of Tübingen , he became master in a school conducted by his brother Thomas in Winterthur. In 1843 he moved to Stuttgart, and, entering the political arena with a pamphlet Württemberg im Jahr 1843, was elected in 1848 a member of the Württemberg House of Deputies; became leader of the democratic party in south Germ...

#7437

Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen

1911 - 1972 (61 years)

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.

#7438

Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan

1935 - 1984 (49 years)

Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. A prolific writer, he wrote throughout his life and published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and four books of poetry. Brautigan's work has been published both in the United States and internationally throughout Europe, Japan, and China. He is best known for his novels Trout Fishing in America , In Watermelon Sugar , and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 .

#7439

Howard Pyle

1853 - 1911 (58 years)

Howard Pyle was an American illustrator, painter, and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.

#7440

Thomas Wyatt

1503 - 1542 (39 years)

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature. He was born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent, though the family was originally from Yorkshire. His family adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. His mother was Anne Skinner, and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a Privy Councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509.

#7441

James Planché

1796 - 1880 (84 years)

James Robinson Planché was a British dramatist, antiquary and officer of arms. Over a period of approximately 60 years he wrote, adapted, or collaborated on 176 plays in a wide range of genres including extravaganza, farce, comedy, burletta, melodrama and opera. Planché was responsible for introducing historically accurate costume into nineteenth century British theatre, and subsequently became an acknowledged expert on historical costume, publishing a number of works on the topic.

#7442

Jean Mabillon

1632 - 1707 (75 years)

Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., was a French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. He is considered the founder of the disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. Early life Mabillon was born in the town of Saint-Pierremont, then in the ancient Province of Champagne, now a part of the Department of Ardennes. He was the son of Estienne Mabillon and his wife Jeanne Guérin. At the age of 12 he became a pupil at the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims. Having entered the seminary in 1650, he left after three years and in 1653 became instead a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi.

#7443

Douglas Bush

1896 - 1983 (87 years)

John Nash Douglas Bush was a literary critic and literary historian. He taught for most of his life at Harvard University, where his students included many of the most prominent scholars, writers, and academics of several generations, including Walter Jackson Bate, Neil Rudenstine, Paul Auster and Aharon Lichtenstein. Students from the 60's report that Bush would sometimes speak in decasyllables, so that it was hard to tell where his recitation of Milton left off and where his commentary began.

#7444

William Dunbar

1460 - 1520 (60 years)

William Dunbar was a Scottish makar, or court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was closely associated with the court of King James IV and produced a large body of work in Scots distinguished by its great variation in themes and literary styles. He was probably a native of East Lothian, as assumed from a satirical reference in The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie. His surname is also spelt Dumbar.

#7445

George Webbe Dasent

1817 - 1896 (79 years)

Sir George Webbe Dasent, D. C. L. was a British lawyer, translator of folk tales and contributor to The Times. Life Dasent was born 22 May 1817 at St. Vincent, British West Indies, the son of the attorney general, John Roche Dasent. His mother was the second wife of his father; Charlotte Martha was the daughter of Captain Alexander Burrowes Irwin.

#7446

James Wright

1927 - 1980 (53 years)

James Arlington Wright was an American poet. Life James Wright was born and spent his childhood in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked in a glass factory, and his mother in a laundry. Neither parent had received more than an eighth grade education. Wright suffered a nervous breakdown in 1943, and he graduated a year late from high school, in 1946.

#7447

Nahum Tate

1652 - 1715 (63 years)

Nahum Tate was an Anglo-Irish poet, hymnist and lyricist, who became Poet Laureate in 1692. Tate is best known for The History of King Lear, his 1681 adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, and for his libretto for Henry Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas.

#7448

Thomas Dekker

1572 - 1632 (60 years)

Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

#7449

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma

1784 - 1842 (58 years)

Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was a Hungarian philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning "the foreign pupil", and was declared a bosatsu or bodhisattva by the Japanese in 1933. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His birth date is often given as 4 April, although this is actually his baptism day and the year of his birth is debated by some authors who put it at 1787 or 1788 rather than 1784. The Magyar ethnic group, the Székelys, to which he belonged believed that they were derived from a branch of Attila's Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century.

#7450

Zhu Ziqing

1898 - 1948 (50 years)

Zhu Ziqing , born Zhu Zihua, was a renowned Chinese poet and essayist. Zhu studied at Peking University, and during the May Fourth Movement became one of several pioneers of modernism in China during the 1920s. Zhu was a prolific writer of both prose and poetry, but is best known for essays like "Retreating Figure" , and "You. Me." . His best known work in verse is the long poem "Destruction" or Huimie .

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