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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#751
Tony Harrison
#5656
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Tony Harrison is an English poet, translator and playwright. He was born in Beeston, Leeds and he received his education in Classics from Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University. He is one of Britain's foremost verse writers and many of his works have been performed at the Royal National Theatre. He is noted for controversial works such as the poem "V", as well as his versions of dramatic works: from ancient Greek such as the tragedies Oresteia and Lysistrata, from French Molière's The Misanthrope, from Middle English The Mysteries. He is also noted for his outspoken views, particularly those on the Iraq War.
Go to Profile#752
Abdulrazak Gurnah
#8736
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise , which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea , which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion , shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Go to Profile#753
Anton Shammas
#10436
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Anton Shammas , is a Palestinian writer, poet and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English. Biography Anton Shammas was one of six children born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, who moved to Fassuta in northern Palestine in 1937 to teach at the local girls' school. In 1962, the family moved to Haifa where Shammas studied in an integrated Jewish-Arab high school. In 1968, Shammas moved to Jerusalem and studied English and Arabic literature and art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#754
Liz Lochhead
#10435
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Liz Lochhead Hon FRSE is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, and served as Poet Laureate for Glasgow between 2005 and 2011.
Go to Profile#755
Antjie Krog
#8156
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Antjie Krog is a South African writer and academic, best known for her Afrikaans poetry, her reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her 1998 book Country of My Skull. In 2004, she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape as Extraordinary Professor.
Go to Profile#756
Barbara Cartland
#7850
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, was an English writer, known as the Queen of Romance, who published both contemporary and historical romance novels, the latter set primarily during the Victorian or Edwardian period. Cartland is one of the best-selling authors worldwide of the 20th century.
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Ángel González Muñiz
#8595
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Ángel González Muñiz was a major Spanish poet of the twentieth century. Biography González was born in Oviedo. He took a law degree at the University of Oviedo and, in 1950, moved to Madrid to work in Civil Administration. It was in Madrid that he first began to write and publish his poetry, becoming friends with many of the leading Spanish writers who encouraged his work. His first book of poems, Áspero mundo , was an immediate critical success. His second book, Grado elemental , was published in Paris and won the prestigious Antonio Machado Prize for Poetry. He published eight more books of...
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David Daiches
#14025
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
David Daiches was a Scottish literary historian and literary critic, scholar and writer. He wrote extensively on English literature, Scottish literature and Scottish culture. Early life He was born in Sunderland, into a Jewish family with a Lithuanian background—the subject of his 1956 memoir, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood. He moved to Edinburgh while still a young child, about the end of the First World War, where his father, Rev Dr Salis Daiches was rabbi to Edinburgh's Jewish community, and founder of the city's branch of B'nai Brith.
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James Lipton
#3667
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Louis James Lipton was an American writer, lyricist, actor, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City. He was the executive producer, writer, and host of the Bravo cable television series Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. He retired from the show in 2018.
Go to Profile#760
Bharathan
#6717
Overall Influence
1947 - 1998 (51 years)
Bharathan was an Indian film maker, artist, and art director. Bharathan is noted for being the founder of a new school of film making in Malayalam cinema, along with Padmarajan and K. G. George, in the 1980s, which created films that were widely received while also being critically acclaimed. A train of directors, and screenwriters followed this school onto the 1990s including Sibi Malayil, Kamal, Lohithadas and Jayaraj.
Go to Profile#761
Anand Bakshi
#10263
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Anand Bakshi was an Indian poet and lyricist. He was nominated for the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist a total of 40 times, resulting in 4 wins. Early life Anand Bakshi was born in Rawalpindi in the Punjab Province of British India , on 21 July 1930 into a Mohyal Brahmin family of the Vaid clan. The family arrived in Delhi, via a Dakota aircraft after the Partition of India and then migrated to Pune, then Meerut and settled again finally in Delhi.
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Tracy Chevalier
#10248
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tracy Rose Chevalier is an American-British novelist. She is best known for her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was adapted as a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.
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Paul Bénichou
#11698
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Paul Bénichou was a French/Algerian writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian. Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics. Later Bénichou undertook a prodigious research program, seeking to understand the radical pessimism and disappointment expressed by mid-nineteenth writers. This project resulted in a series of major works, beginning with Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830 . A 1995 volume, Selon Mallarmé, may be considered an extension of this series. Together, these works amount to an important reinterpretation of French romanticism.
Go to Profile#764
Ira Levin
#6813
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Ira Marvin Levin was an American novelist, playwright, and songwriter. His works include the novels A Kiss Before Dying , Rosemary's Baby , The Stepford Wives , This Perfect Day , The Boys from Brazil , and Sliver . Levin also wrote the play Deathtrap . Many of his novels and plays have been adapted into films. He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and several Edgar Awards.
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Luis Leal
#14621
Overall Influence
1907 - 2010 (103 years)
Luis Leal was a Mexican-American writer and literary critic. Biography Born into a family that had participated in the Mexican Revolution, Leal lived in the United States beginning in 1927, studying at Northwestern University. There, in 1936, he met his future wife Gladys Clemens, with whom he had two sons, Antonio and Luis Alfonso. In 1939 he was naturalized as an American citizen. After serving in the Philippines during the Second World War, he resumed his literary studies at the University of Chicago, where in 1950 he acquired a doctorate in Spanish and Italian literature.
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Nathaniel Mackey
#22383
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.
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Anthony Thwaite
#12356
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Anthony Simon Thwaite was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters. Early years and education Born in Chester, England, to Yorkshire parents, Thwaite at the age of 10 crossed the Atlantic alone to spend the war years in and around Washington D.C., with an aunt and uncle. On D-Day in 1944 he was on his way home. At Kingswood School, Bath, a teacher, praising his Anglo-Saxon type riddles, encouraged him to think he was a poet. National Service near Leptis Magna in Libya, encouraged him further, both as a poet and as an amat...
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Michael Warner
#7346
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael David Warner is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic. He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Go to Profile#769
June Jordan
#10479
Overall Influence
1936 - 2002 (66 years)
June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.
Go to Profile#770
Mikhail Elizarov
#26400
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Mikhail Yuryevich Elizarov – is a modern Russian writer and singer-songwriter, laureate of the Russian Booker Prize in 2008 for the novel The Librarian. Literary career In 2001, the Russian publishing house Ad Marginem issued a collection of short novels Fingernails, which immediately captured the attention of the media and critics. The collection includes 24 short stories and a novel of the same title, the main characters of which are two pupils who possess paranormal abilities studying in a boarding school for demented children. The story was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely literary prize. ...
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Darryl Pinckney
#15864
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Darryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. Early life Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.
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E. F. Bleiler
#18849
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Everett Franklin Bleiler was an American editor, bibliographer, and scholar of science fiction, detective fiction, and fantasy literature. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he co-edited the first "year's best" series of science fiction anthologies, and his Checklist of Fantastic Literature has been called "the foundation of modern SF bibliography". Among his other scholarly works are two Hugo Award–nominated volumes concerning early science fiction—Science-Fiction: The Early Years and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years—and the massive Guide to Supernatural Fiction.
Go to Profile#773
Edward P. Jones
#6475
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel The Known World. Biography Edward Paul Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He was educated at Cardozo High School, the College of the Holy Cross, and the University of Virginia.
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George Elliott Clarke
#8432
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
George Elliott Clarke, is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015, and as the 2016–2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His work is known largely for its use of a vast range of literary and artistic traditions , its lush physicality and its bold political substance. One of Canada's most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that he has coined "Africadia".
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Monique Wittig
#6461
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères , was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
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Galway Kinnell
#9708
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
Go to Profile#777
Yiyun Li
#16024
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Go to Profile#778
Charles Bernstein
#13408
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program.
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Denis Johnson
#16085
Overall Influence
1949 - 2017 (68 years)
Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son . His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke , won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
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George Landow
#22023
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
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Richard Holmes
#11061
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. Biography Richard Gordon Heath Holmes was born on 5 November 1945 in London. He was educated at Downside School, Somerset, and Churchill College, Cambridge. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007 and has honorary doctorates from the University of East London, University of Kingston, and the Tavistock Institute.
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Lanford Wilson
#5783
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
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Maurice Bardèche
#3539
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Maurice Bardèche was a French art critic and journalist, better known as one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism in post–World War II Europe. Bardèche was also the brother-in-law of the collaborationist novelist, poet and journalist Robert Brasillach, executed after the liberation of France in 1945.
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Sue Townsend
#11053
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Susan Lillian Townsend was an English writer and humorist whose work encompasses novels, plays and works of journalism. She was best known for creating the character Adrian Mole. After writing in secret from the age of 14, Townsend first became known for her plays, her signature character first appearing in a radio drama, but her work soon expanded into other forms. She enjoyed great success in the 1980s, with her Adrian Mole books selling more copies than any other work of fiction in Britain during the decade. This series, which eventually encompassed nine books, takes the form of the character's diaries.
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Chris Van Allsburg
#8816
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Chris Van Allsburg is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He has won two Caldecott Medals for U.S. picture book illustration, for Jumanji and The Polar Express , both of which he also wrote, and were later adapted as successful motion pictures. He was also a Caldecott runner-up in 1980 for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, he was a 1986 U.S. nominee for the biennial International Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Hum...
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Dwight Garner
#18802
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Dwight Garner is an American journalist and longtime writer and editor for The New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper. He is the author of Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany and Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.
Go to Profile#787
Njabulo Ndebele
#7493
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele is an academic and writer of fiction who is the former vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town . On November 16, 2012, he was inaugurated as the chancellor of the University of Johannesburg. He is currently the chairman of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Go to Profile#788
James Kelman
#17124
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow. Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.".
Go to Profile#789
Terry Tempest Williams
#7429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Terry Tempest Williams , is an American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of Utah. Her work focuses on social and environmental justice ranging from issues of ecology and the protection of public lands and wildness, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature. She writes in the genre of creative nonfiction and the lyrical essay.
Go to Profile#790
Yan Lianke
#17834
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Yan Lianke is a Chinese writer of novels and short stories based in Beijing. His work is highly satirical, which has resulted in some of his most renowned works being banned in China. He has admitted to self-censorship while writing his stories in order to avoid censorship.
Go to Profile#791
Lawrence Venuti
#6826
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Lawrence Venuti is an American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. Career Born in Philadelphia, Venuti graduated from Temple University. In 1980 he completed a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, where he studied with historically oriented literary scholars such as Joseph Mazzeo and Edward Tayler as well as theoretically engaged cultural and social critics such as Edward Said and Sylvere Lotringer. That year he received the Renato Poggioli Award for Italian Translation for his translation of Barbara Alberti's novel Delirium.
Go to Profile#792
Brian Mansfield
#10566
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Brian Mansfield is an American writer and journalist. Early life and education Mansfield grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated from David Lipscomb High School. In 1984, Mansfield received a bachelor's degree cum laude from Berklee College of Music. From 1984 to 1987 he attended Belmont University in Nashville, taking classes in journalism and the music industry.
Go to Profile#793
Albert Wendt
#13184
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973 , and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#794
Dominick Dunne
#4385
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Dominick John Dunne was an American writer, investigative journalist, and producer. He began his career in film and television as a producer of the pioneering gay film The Boys in the Band and as the producer of the award-winning drug film The Panic in Needle Park . He turned to writing in the early 1970s. After the 1982 murder of his daughter Dominique, an actress, he began to write about the interaction of wealth and high society with the judicial system. Dunne was a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and, beginning in the 1980s, often appeared on television discussing crime.
Go to Profile#795
Richard Poirier
#13392
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Richard Poirier was an American literary critic. Career He graduated from Amherst College, Yale University, and Harvard University, and also studied under the literary critic F. R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship.
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John Neumeier
#6609
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Neumeier is an American ballet dancer, choreographer, and director. He has been the director and chief choreographer of Hamburg Ballet since 1973. Five years later he founded the Hamburg Ballet School, which also includes a boarding school for students. In 1996, Neumeier was made ballet director of Hamburg State Opera.
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Gustavo Pérez Firmat
#13175
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gustavo Pérez Firmat was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. He attended Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He taught at Duke University from 1979 to 1999 and at Columbia University until 2022. He is currently the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#798
Mohammed Dib
#11783
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Mohammed Dib was an Algerian author. He wrote over 30 novels, as well as numerous short stories, poems, and children's literature in the French language. His work covers the breadth of 19th century Algerian history, focusing on Algeria's fight for independence.
Go to Profile#799
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
#17713
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
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Ted Kooser
#13133
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
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