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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,

#7451

Mario Pei

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.

#7452

Nikolaos Kontopoulos

1889 - 1958 (69 years)

Nikolaos Kontopoulos was a Greek writer. He was born in the village of Lousika in Achaea, Greece. He studied in Athens and later studied as a student and as a professor at the polytechnical school. He wrote many books.

#7453

James Frank Gilliam

1915 - 1990 (75 years)

James Frank Gilliam was an American classical scholar and historian of ancient Rome. Career James Frank Gilliam studied at San Jose State University and at Stanford University . In 1940 he earned his Ph.D. at Yale University under the classicist Michael Rostovtzeff. After his Ph.D., he worked as an instructor in classics until his academic career was interrupted by military service in World War II from 1941 to 1945.

#7454

Edward Kennard Rand

1871 - 1945 (74 years)

Edward Kennard Rand FBA , known widely as E.K. Rand or to his peers as EKR, was an American classical scholar and medievalist. He served as the Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard University from 1901 until 1942, during which period he was also the Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for two terms. Rand is best known for his 1928 work, Founders of the Middle Ages.

#7455

Maurice Bowra

1898 - 1971 (73 years)

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, was an English classical scholar, literary critic and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

#7456

Eric Gardner Turner

1911 - 1983 (72 years)

Sir Eric Gardner Turner CBE was an English papyrologist and classicist. Turner was born in Broomhill, Sheffield. He was educated at King Edward VII School and Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught classics at the University of Aberdeen from 1936 to 1948, although from 1941 to 1945 he served in the Naval Intelligence Division at Bletchley Park. In 1948 he became first Reader in Papyrology at University College, London, and was promoted to professor in 1950. He retired in 1978.

#7457

Donald F. Bond

1898 - 1987 (89 years)

Donald F. Bond was professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of the standard edition of The Spectator in five volumes, published in 1965, selections from which may be found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He was also the joint editor of the scholarly edition of the first three volumes of The Tatler. He was a contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.

#7458

Kemp Malone

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Kemp Malone was an American medievalist, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Chaucer who was lecturer and then professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University from 1924 to 1956. Life and career Born in an academic family, Kemp Malone graduated from Emory College as it then was in 1907, with the ambition of mastering all the languages that impinged upon the development of Middle English. He spent several years in Germany, Denmark and Iceland. When World War I broke out, he served two years in the United States Army and was discharged with the rank of captain.

#7459

Arnold Wycombe Gomme

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

Arnold Wycombe Gomme was a British classical scholar, lecturer for ancient Greek and Greek history , Professor of Greek, University of Glasgow , Fellow of the British Academy . Life He was born to Laurence and Alice Gomme, noted folklore experts. He studied at Merchant Taylor's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1911, he became assistant lecturer for Greek and Greek history at the University of Glasgow. In 1946, he became professor of ancient Greek at the same university.

#7460

Allardyce Nicoll

1894 - 1976 (82 years)

John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll was a British literary scholar and teacher. Allardyce Nicoll was born in Partick, Glasgow, and educated at Stirling High School and the University of Glasgow, where he was the G. A. Clark scholar in English. He became a lecturer at King's College London in 1920 and took the chair of English at East London College in 1923. In 1933 he went to Yale University as professor of the history of drama and dramatic criticism and chair of the drama department. He established a strong graduate programme in theatre history. Around 1943–45 he performed war work at the British embassy in Washington.

#7461

Sheila Coronel

Sheila S. Coronel is a Philippines-born investigative journalist and journalism professor. She is one of the founders of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism . In 2006, she was named the inaugural director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 2014, she was appointed the School's Academic Dean, a position she held until the end of 2020.

#7462

Ronald Syme

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Sir Ronald Syme, was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. He was regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon. His great work was The Roman Revolution , a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

#7463

Arthur Stanley Pease

1881 - 1964 (83 years)

Arthur Stanley Pease was a professor of Classics, a respected amateur botanist, and the tenth president of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Pease was once described by his fellow faculty members as an "indefatigable pedestrian, and New Englander to the core."

#7464

Thomas Ollive Mabbott

1898 - 1968 (70 years)

Thomas Ollive Mabbott was an American professor and scholar of literature, perhaps best known for his research on writer Edgar Allan Poe. He has also done studies on John Milton, Walt Whitman, Thomas Chatterton, and Edward Coote Pinkney.

#7465

Joseph Twadell Shipley

1893 - 1988 (95 years)

Joseph Twadell Shipley was an American drama critic, author, editor and associate professor of English at Yeshiva College in New York City. Early life Shipley graduated from City College in 1912. He received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia in 1931 with the thesis The quest for literature; a survey of literary criticism and the theories of the literary forms.

#7466

Richmond Lattimore

Richmond Lattimore

1906 - 1984 (78 years)

Richmond Alexander Lattimore was an American poet and classicist known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Biography Born to David and Margaret Barnes Lattimore in Paotingfu, China, he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1926. His brother Owen Lattimore was a Sinologist who was blacklisted for his association with China during the McCarthy era, but subsequently rehabilitated when none of the charges against him proved to be true. Their sister Eleanor Frances Lattimore was an author and illustrator of children's books.

#7467

Arthur Garfield Kennedy

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.

#7468

Antony Andrewes

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977. Early life Andrewes was born in Tavistock, Devon, England, on 12 June 1910. He was educated at Winchester College from 1923 to 1929. He studied at New College, Oxford, between 1929 and 1933.

#7469

Cedric Whitman

1916 - 1979 (63 years)

Cedric Hubbell Whitman was an American poet and academic from Providence, Rhode Island. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1947 and joined the faculty that year. In 1966, he became the first Jones Professor of Classic Literature. In 1974, Whitman became the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, a position he would serve until his death in 1979.

#7470

Michael Anesko

1900 - Present (126 years)

Michael Anesko is a U.S. literary critic, writer and professor. He is perhaps best known for his studies of 19th-century American novelists, in particular, Henry James and William Dean Howells. He is currently a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and previously served as faculty advisor for the department's undergraduate honors program. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and also in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#7471

Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge

1873 - 1952 (79 years)

Sir Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge, was a British classicist and one of the greatest authorities on the theatre of ancient Greece in the first half of the 20th century. Pickard-Cambridge was born in Bloxworth Rectory, the son of the Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge , a naturalist and entomologist.

#7472

Israel Edward Drabkin

1905 - 1965 (60 years)

Israel E. Drabkin was an American classicist and historian of science, medicine, and mathematics. He spent much of his career at the City College of New York. He is known for his studies of Caelius Aurelianus and Galileo.

#7473

Gregory Tschebotarioff

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, , was a Russian-born civil engineer and prolific author. His memoir Russia, My Native Land recounted his experiences as a boy and young man in Russia, where he served in the military during World War I.

#7474

James Runcieman Sutherland

1900 - 1996 (96 years)

Sir James Runcieman Sutherland, FBA was an English literary scholar, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern Literature at London University. Life Sutherland was born on 26 April 1900 in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University before studying at Merton College, Oxford. From 1930 to 1936 he was Senior Lecturer at University College London. He married Helen Dircks in 1931. From 1936 to 1944 he was Professor of English Literature, and from 1944 to 1951 Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen Mary College. In 1951 he was appointed Lord Northcliffe P...

#7475

J. Seelye Bixler

J. Seelye Bixler

1894 - 1985 (91 years)

Julius Seelye Bixler was the 16th President of Colby College, Maine, United States, from 1942–1960. Early life Born Julius Seelye Bixler in New London, CT, to James William Bixler and Elizabeth J. Seelye Bixler. His father was a clergyman who was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate. His maternal grandfather was Julius Hawley Seelye, president of Amherst College from 1876–90, and his grand-uncle was Laurenus Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College.

#7476

Lawrance Thompson

1906 - 1973 (67 years)

Lawrance Roger Thompson 3 April 1906 — 15 April 1973 Early life and education Thompson was born on 3 April 1906 in Franklin, New Hampshire. For his post-secondary education, Thompson received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1928 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1939.

#7477

Wolfgang Schadewaldt

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

Wolfgang Schadewaldt was a German classical philologist working mostly in the field of Greek philology and a translator. He also was a professor of University of Tübingen and University of Freiburg.

#7478

Lewis Thorpe

1913 - 1977 (64 years)

Lewis Guy Melville Thorpe FRSA FRHistS was a British philologist and translator. He was married to the Italian scholar and lexicographer Barbara Reynolds. After service in Italy in the Second World War, Lewis Thorpe joined the staff of the University of Nottingham in 1946. He was Professor of French there from 1958 to 1977. He served as President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

#7479

Ivan Mortimer Linforth

1879 - 1976 (97 years)

Ivan Mortimer Linforth was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at University of California, Berkeley. According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus , in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature. His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars. His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece.

#7480

Theodore Spencer

1902 - 1949 (47 years)

Theodore Spencer was an American poet and academic. Life He graduated from Princeton University in 1923, and a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1928. He then taught there, from 1927 to 1949. He was appointed lecturer in English literature at Cambridge University, England, in 1939. In 1942, Spencer gave the Lowell lectures on Shakespeare, published as Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, his most important work. Spencer also published essays, short stories, and poetry.

#7481

E. Talbot Donaldson

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was a scholar of medieval English literature, known for his 1966 translation of Beowulf and his writings on Chaucer's poetry. Biography Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was born on 18 March 1910 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Harvard University, gaining his BA in 1932. He began his career by teaching languages at the Kent School in Connecticut. He was awarded a fellowship at Yale University in 1942, rising to become the George E. Bodman Professor of English there. During the Second World War he served in the United States Air Force, rising through the ranks from private to captain.

#7482

Frederick Rees

1883 - 1967 (84 years)

Sir James Frederick Rees , known as Frederick Rees, was a Welsh historian and academic born in Milford Haven, who specialised in economic history and the history of Wales. From 1929 to 1949, he was Principal of University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. He was additionally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1935 to 1937 and also from 1944 to 1946. He had previously lectured at University College, Bangor, Queen's University Belfast, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Birmingham. He served as High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire for 1955.

#7483

R. P. Blackmur

1904 - 1965 (61 years)

Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet. Life Blackmur was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Cambridge High and Latin School, but was expelled in 1918. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934.

#7484

Ernest Weekley

1865 - 1954 (89 years)

Ernest Weekley was a British philologist, best known as the author of a number of works on etymology. His An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English has been cited as a source by most authors of similar books over the 90 years since it was published. From 1898 to 1938, he was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham.

#7485

Robert J. Getty

1908 - 1963 (55 years)

Robert John Getty was a Classicist and expert on the ancient author Lucan. Getty earned an A.B. from Queens University, Belfast, in 1928 and a master's degree from St John's College, Cambridge in 1930, where he was lecturer from 1937–1947. He became professor of Latin at the University of Toronto in 1947. In 1958 he became the first George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#7486

Ángel Rosenblat

Ángel Rosenblat

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Ángel Rosenblat was a Poland-born Venezuelan philologist, essayist and hispanist of Jewish descent. Life He and his family moved to Argentina when he was six and he spent his whole education there, including at the University of Buenos Aires, where his classmates included Amado Alonso, and in its Institute of Philology, where his teachers included Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

#7487

Nicoletta Momigliano

1900 - Present (126 years)

Nicoletta Momigliano is an archaeologist specialising in Minoan Crete and its modern reception. Early life and education Momigliano was born in Milan, Italy, in 1960, where she attended primary and secondary school. She read Classics at the University of Pisa, where she graduated in 1982. She obtained her MA from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London , and her PhD from University College London , under the supervision of John Nicolas Coldstream. From 1990 to 1993 she was a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Research Assistant to Ann Br...

#7488

Caroline Spurgeon

Caroline Spurgeon

1869 - 1942 (73 years)

Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon was an English literary critic. In 1913, she was appointed Hildred Carlisle Professor of English at the University of London and became head of the Department of English at Bedford College, London. She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain . She co-founded the International Federation of University Women with Virginia Gildersleeve.

#7489

Gleb Struve

1898 - 1985 (87 years)

Gleb Petrovich Struve was a Russian poet and literary historian. Biography Gleb Petrovich Struve was born on 1 May 1898. His father was the political theorist Peter Berngardovich Struve. Struve came from St. Petersburg and joined the Volunteer Army in 1918. Later that year he fled to Finland, then to Britain, where he studied at the University of Oxford until 1921. It was there that he met Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he remained on friendly terms and corresponded until the novelist's death.

#7490

John Neihardt

1881 - 1973 (92 years)

John Gneisenau Neihardt was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had displaced.

#7491

Gilbert Norwood

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Gilbert Norwood was a British classical philologist and essayist. Life Gilbert Norwood studied at St John's College of Cambridge University with John Edwin Sandys and Richard Claverhouse Jebb. After completing his Bachelor's degree , he was employed as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Manchester. He also completed his master's at Cambridge and was a Fellow at St. John's College from 1906 to 1909.

#7492

Frank Aydelotte

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Franklin Ridgeway Aydelotte was a U.S. educator. He became the first non-Quaker president of Swarthmore College and between 1921 and 1940 redefined the institution. He was active in the Rhodes Scholar program, helped evacuate intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis during the 1930s and served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study during World War II.

#7493

John Berryman

1914 - 1972 (58 years)

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.

#7494

Edith Morley

1875 - 1964 (89 years)

Edith Julia Morley, was a literary scholar and activist. She was the main twentieth century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was a Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, now the University of Reading, from 1908 to 1940, making her the first woman to be appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution. She was a socialist and member of the Fabian society, active in various suffrage campaigns, and received an OBE for her efforts coordinating Reading's refugee programme during the Second World War.

#7495

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to writing, Williams was a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked".

#7496

Ferdowsi

940 - 1020 (80 years)

Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi , also Firdawsi or Ferdowsi , was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh , which is one of the world's longest epic poemss created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of Persian-speaking countries. Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature.

#7497

Jonathan Swift

1667 - 1745 (78 years)

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".

#7498

Walter Scott

1771 - 1832 (61 years)

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet , was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe , Rob Roy , Waverley , Old Mortality , The Heart of Mid-Lothian , and The Bride of Lammermoor , along with the narrative poems Marmion and The Lady of the Lake . He had a major impact on European and American literature.

#7499

Jean Racine

1639 - 1699 (60 years)

Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther for the young.

#7500

Robert Frost

1874 - 1963 (89 years)

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

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