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,
#7451
Kenneth Grahame
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Kenneth Grahame was a British writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows , a classic of children's literature, as well as The Reluctant Dragon. Both books were later adapted for stage and film, of which A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall, based on part of The Wind in the Willows, was the first. Other adaptations include Cosgrove Hall Films' The Wind in the Willows , and the Walt Disney films .
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Michael Madhusudan Dutt
1824 - 1873 (49 years)
Michael Madhusudan Dutt was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature. Early life Dutt was born in Sagardari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Bengal, to a Hindu family. His family being reasonably well-off, Dutt received an education in the English language and additional tutorship in English at home. Rajnarayan had intended for this Western education to open the doors for a government position for his son.
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Louis Zukofsky
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
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César Vallejo
1892 - 1938 (46 years)
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-c...
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Jan Kasprowicz
1860 - 1926 (66 years)
Jan Kasprowicz was a poet, playwright, critic and translator; a foremost representative of Young Poland. Biography Kasprowicz was born in the village of Szymborze within the Province of Posen, to an illiterate peasant family. From 1870 he studied in Prussian gymnasia in Inowrazlaw , Posen , Oppeln , Ratibor , and in 1884 graduated from Saint Mary Magdalene Gymnasium in Poznań. He studied philosophy and literature in German universities in Leipzig and Breslau. During his studies he began having articles and poetry published, working with various Polish magazines. For his activities in sociali...
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Machado de Assis
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis , often known by his surnames as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho , was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. In 1897, he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was multilingual, having taught himself French, English, German and Greek later in life.
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Victorien Sardou
1831 - 1908 (77 years)
Victorien Sardou was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca is based, and Fédora and Madame Sans-Gêne that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora and Madame Sans-Gêne by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.
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George Chapman
1559 - 1634 (75 years)
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. William Minto speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.
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Shinobu Orikuchi
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Shinobu Orikuchi, also known as Chōkū Shaku, was a Japanese ethnologist, linguist, folklorist, novelist, and poet. As a disciple of Kunio Yanagita, he established an original academic field named "Orikuchiism", which is a mixture of Japanese folklore, Japanese classics, and Shintō. He produced many works in a diversity of fields covering the history of literature, folkloric performing arts, folklore itself, Japanese language, the classics study, Shintōology, ancient study, and so on. Yukio Mishima once called him the "Japanese Walter Pater".
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Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
1836 - 1870 (34 years)
Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida , better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer , was a Spanish Romantic poet and writer , also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented in drawing. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in Spanish literature, and is considered by some as the most read writer after Miguel de Cervantes. He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier. He was associated with the romanticism and post-romanticism movements and wrote while realism was enjoying success in Spain. He was moderately well known during his life, but it was after his death that most of his works were published.
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George Crabbe
1754 - 1832 (78 years)
George Crabbe was an English poet, surgeon and clergyman. He is best known for his early use of the realistic narrative form and his descriptions of middle and working-class life and people. In the 1770s, Crabbe began his career as a doctor's apprentice, later becoming a surgeon. In 1780, he travelled to London to make a living as a poet. After encountering serious financial difficulty and being unable to have his work published, he wrote to the statesman and author Edmund Burke for assistance. Burke was impressed enough by Crabbe's poems to promise to help him in any way he could. The two be...
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Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
1565 - 1601 (36 years)
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, KG, PC was an English nobleman and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Politically ambitious, and a committed general, he was placed under house arrest following a poor campaign in Ireland during the Nine Years' War in 1599. In 1601, he led an abortive coup d'état against the government of Elizabeth I and was executed for treason.
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Philip Massinger
1583 - 1640 (57 years)
Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.
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Joachim du Bellay
1522 - 1560 (38 years)
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a founder of La Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin.
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Herbert Weir Smyth
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Herbert Weir Smyth was an American classical scholar. His comprehensive grammar of Ancient Greek has become a standard reference on the subject in English, comparable to that of William Watson Goodwin, whom he succeeded as Eliott Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University.
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Fannie Hurst
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst also actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
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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.
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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 ...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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