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,
#7551
Dorothy Wordsworth
1771 - 1855 (84 years)
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings.
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Moss Hart
1904 - 1961 (57 years)
Moss Hart was an American playwright, librettist, and theater director. Early years Hart was born in New York City, the son of Lillian and Barnett Hart, a cigar maker. He had a younger brother, Bernard. He grew up in relative poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and in Sea Gate, Brooklyn. He was the great-grandson of the Jewish bare-knuckle pugilist Barney Aaron.
Go to Profile#7553
Sugawara no Michizane
845 - 903 (58 years)
Sugawara no Michizane was a scholar, poet, and politician of the Heian Period of Japan. He is regarded as an excellent poet, particularly in waka and kanshi poetry, and is today revered in Shinto as the god of learning, Tenman-Tenjin. In the poem anthology Hyakunin Isshu, he is known as Kanke, and in kabuki drama he is known as Kan Shōjō.
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Kostis Palamas
1859 - 1943 (84 years)
Kostis Palamas was a Greek poet who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn. He was a central figure of the Greek literary generation of the 1880s and one of the cofounders of the so-called New Athenian School along with Georgios Drosinis and Ioannis Polemis.
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Jan Kochanowski
1530 - 1584 (54 years)
Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who wrote in Latin and Polish and established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language. He has been called the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz and one of the most influential Slavic poets prior to the 19th century.
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Alexander Woollcott
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American drama critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
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Gottfried August Bürger
1747 - 1794 (47 years)
Gottfried August Bürger was a German poet. His ballads were very popular in Germany. His most noted ballad, Lenore, found an audience beyond readers of the German language in an English and Russian adaptation and a French translation.
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Robert W. Chambers
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Life Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton . His parents met when his mother was twelve years old and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually the two formed the law firm of Chambers and Boughton which continued to prosper even after Joseph's death in 1861. Robert Chambers's great-grandfather, ...
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Carlos Drummond de Andrade
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a Brazilian poet and writer, considered by some as the greatest Brazilian poet of all time. He has become something of a national cultural symbol in Brazil, where his widely influential poem "Canção Amiga" has been featured on the 50-cruzado novo bill.
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Frank O'Connor
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Frank O'Connor was an Irish author and translator. He wrote poetry , dramatic works, memoirs, journalistic columns and features on aspects of Irish culture and history, criticism, long and short fiction , biography, and travel books. He is most widely known for his more than 150 short stories and for his memoirs. The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award was named in his honour.
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Fyodor Tyutchev
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev was a Russian poet and diplomat. Life Tyutchev was born into a Russian noble family in the Ovstug family estate near Bryansk . His father Ivan Nikolaevich Tyutchev was a court councillor who served in the Kremlin Expedition that managed all building and restoration works of Moscow palaces. One of Ivan's sister , was a hegumenia famous for founding the Borisoglebsky Anosin Women's Monastery. The Tyutchevs traced their roots to Zakhariy Tutchev mentioned in The Tale of the Rout of Mamai, a 15th-century epic tale about the Battle of Kulikovo that described him as the ...
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Alfred Jarry
1873 - 1907 (34 years)
Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi , often cited as a forerunner of Dada and the Surrealist and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
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John Gower
1330 - 1408 (78 years)
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
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Aphra Behn
1640 - 1689 (49 years)
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea.
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Susan Glaspell
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
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Jami
1414 - 1492 (78 years)
Nūr ad-Dīn 'Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī , also known as Mawlanā Nūr al-Dīn 'Abd al-Rahmān or Abd-Al-Rahmān Nur-Al-Din Muhammad Dashti, or simply as Jami or Djāmī and in Turkey as Molla Cami, was a Sunni poet who is known for his achievements as a prolific scholar and writer of mystical Sufi literature. He was primarily a prominent poet-theologian of the school of Ibn Arabi and a Khwājagānī Sũfī, recognized for his eloquence and for his analysis of the metaphysics of mercy. His most famous poetic works are Haft Awrang, Tuhfat al-Ahrar, Layla wa Majnun, Fatihat al-Shabab, Lawa'ih, Al-Durrah al-Fakhirah. ...
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Agathias
536 - 582 (46 years)
Agathias Scholasticus was a Greek poet and the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558. Biography Agathias was a native of Myrina , an Aeolian city in western Asia Minor. His father was Memnonius. His mother was presumably Pericleia. A brother of Agathias is mentioned in primary sources, but his name has not survived. Their probable sister Eugenia is known by name. The Suda clarifies that Agathias was active in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I, mentioning him as a contemporary of Paul the Silentiary, Macedonius of Thessalonica an...
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Edmond Rostand
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques , was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.
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Christian Gottlob Heyne
1729 - 1812 (83 years)
Christian Gottlob Heyne was a German classical scholar and archaeologist as well as long-time director of the Göttingen State and University Library. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Maurice Leblanc
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.
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Anthony Hope
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope , was a British novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered predominantly for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau . These works, "minor classics" of English literature, are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance, books set in fictional European locales similar to the novels. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of the same name and the 195...
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Paul Heyse
1830 - 1914 (84 years)
Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry, 177 short stories, and about sixty dramas. The sum of Heyse's many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. He was awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-reno...
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Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
1883 - 1945 (62 years)
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels. Despite having opposed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he was able to return to Russia six years later and live a privileged life as a highly paid author, reputedly a millionaire, who adapted his writings to conform to the line laid down by the communist party.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy , A Little Princess , and The Secret Garden . Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor.
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Sidonius Apollinaris
430 - 489 (59 years)
Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, better known as Sidonius Apollinaris , was a poet, diplomat, and bishop. Born into the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, he was son-in-law to Emperor Avitus and was appointed Urban prefect of Rome by Emperor Anthemius in 468. In 469 he was appointed Bishop of Clermont and he led the defence of the city from Euric, King of the Visigoths, from 473 to 475. He retained his position as bishop after the city's conquest, until his death in the 480s. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic church, the Orthodox Church, and the True Orthodox Church, with his feast ...
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Hermann Usener
1834 - 1905 (71 years)
Hermann Karl Usener was a German scholar in the fields of philology and comparative religion. Life Hermann Usener was born at Weilburg and educated at its Gymnasium. From 1853 he studied at Heidelberg, Munich, Göttingen and Bonn.
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Charles Anthon
1797 - 1867 (70 years)
Charles Anthon was an American classical scholar. Anthon was a professor at Columbia College and became headmaster of its grammar and preparatory school. He produced classical works for schools, which contained assistance and translations in the notes. He had a disagreement with Martin Harris over an account where they discussed the authenticity of the Anthon Transcript of the Book of Mormon. Anthon was also an acquaintance of writer Edgar Allan Poe. He died in New York City at the age of 69.
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Tatsuji Miyoshi
1900 - 1964 (64 years)
Tatsuji Miyoshi was a Japanese poet, literary critic, and literary editor active during the Shōwa period of Japan. He is known for his lengthy free verse poetry, which often portray loneliness and isolation as part of contemporary life, but which are written in a complex, highly literary style reminiscent of classical Japanese poetry.
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Hans Fallada
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Hans Fallada was a German writer of the first half of the 20th century. Some of his better known novels include Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone . His works belong predominantly to the New Objectivity literary style, a style associated with an emotionless reportage approach, with precision of detail, and a veneration for 'the fact'. Fallada's pseudonym derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm's Fairy Tales: The titular protagonist of Hans in Luck , and Falada the magical talking horse in The Goose Girl.
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Pierre de Marivaux
1688 - 1763 (75 years)
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux , commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French playwright and novelist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l'amour, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu.
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Multatuli
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Eduard Douwes Dekker , better known by his pen name Multatuli , was a Dutch writer best known for his satirical novel Max Havelaar , which denounced the abuses of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies . He is considered one of the Netherlands' greatest authors.
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Alphonse Daudet
1840 - 1897 (57 years)
Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the husband of Julia Daudet and father of Edmée, Léon and Lucien Daudet. Early life Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. His father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began his career as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable and Daudet said later that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils.
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Mort Weisinger
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Mortimer Weisinger was an American magazine and comic book editor best known for editing DC Comics' Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s, in the Silver Age of comic books. He also co-created such features as Aquaman, Green Arrow, Johnny Quick, and the original Vigilante, served as story editor for the Adventures of Superman television series, and compiled the often-revised paperback 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free.
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Thomas Nashe
1567 - 1601 (34 years)
Thomas Nashe was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer. He is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.
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Stefan Żeromski
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Stefan Żeromski was a Polish novelist and dramatist belonging to the Young Poland movement at the turn of the 20th century. He was called the "conscience of Polish literature". He also wrote under the pen names Maurycy Zych, Józef Katerla, and Stefan Iksmoreż.
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Else Lasker-Schüler
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Else Lasker-Schüler was a German-Jewish poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Lasker-Schüler fled Nazi Germany and lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem.
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Sheridan Le Fanu
1814 - 1873 (59 years)
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of his time, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.
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Carlo Collodi
1826 - 1890 (64 years)
Carlo Lorenzini , better known by the pen name Carlo Collodi , was an Italian author, humourist, and journalist, widely known for his fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Early life Collodi was born in Florence on 24 November 1826. His mother Angiolina Orzali Lorenzini was a seamstress from Collodi, the town from which he later took the pen name, and his father Domenico Lorenzini was a cook. Both parents worked for the Ginori Lisci. Carlo was the eldest child in the family and he had ten siblings; seven died at a young age. He spent most of his childhood in the town of Collodi where his mother was born.
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Malik ibn Anas
711 - 795 (84 years)
Malik ibn Anas , whose full name is Mālik bin Anas bin Mālik bin Abī ʿĀmir bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith bin Ghaymān bin Khuthayn bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith al-Aṣbaḥī al-Ḥumyarī al-Madanī , reverently known as al-Imām Mālik by Sunni Muslims, was a Muslim jurist, theologian, and hadith traditionist. Born in the city of Medina, Malik rose to become the premier scholar of prophetic traditions in his day, which he sought to apply to "the whole legal life" in order to create a systematic method of Muslim jurisprudence which would only further expand with the passage of time. Referred to as the "Imam of Medi...
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Thomas Wolfe
1900 - 1938 (38 years)
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.
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Georg Friedrich Creuzer
1771 - 1858 (87 years)
Georg Friedrich Creuzer was a German philologist and archaeologist. Life He was born at Marburg, the son of a bookbinder. After studying at Marburg and at the University of Jena, he went to Leipzig as a private tutor; but in 1802 he was appointed professor at Marburg, and two years later professor of philology and ancient history at Heidelberg. He held the latter position for nearly forty-five years, with the exception of a short time spent at the University of Leiden, where his health was affected by the Dutch climate. He was one of the principal founders of the Philological Seminary established at Heidelberg in 1807.
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Chikamatsu Monzaemon
1653 - 1725 (72 years)
Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist". His most famous plays deal with double-suicides of honor bound lovers. Of his puppet plays, around 70 are jidaimono and 24 are sewamono . The domestic plays are today considered the core of his artistic achievement, particularly works such as The Courier for Hell and The Love Suicides at Amijima . His histories are viewed less posi...
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Ogden Nash
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared by The New York Times the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.
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Théodore de Banville
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century. Biography Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the amusements of his companions. On leaving school with but slender means of support, he devoted himself to letters, and in 1842 published his first volume of verse , which was followed by Les Stalactites in 1846. ...
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William Jones
1746 - 1794 (48 years)
Sir William Jones was a British philologist, orientalist and a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
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Dositej Obradović
1742 - 1811 (69 years)
Dositej Obradović was a Serbian writer, biographer, diarist, philosopher, pedagogue, educational reformer, linguist, polyglot and the first minister of education of Serbia. An influential protagonist of the Serbian national and cultural renaissance, he advocated Enlightenment and rationalist ideas, while remaining a Serbian patriot and an adherent of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
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Lucian Blaga
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. Biography Blaga was born on 9 May 1895 in Lámkerék , near Gyulafehérvár , Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, his father being an Orthodox priest. He later described his early childhood, in the autobiographical The Chronicle and the Song of Ages, as "under the sign of the incredible absence of the word".
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George Abbott
1887 - 1995 (108 years)
George Francis Abbott was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director and producer whose career spanned eight decades. He received numerous honors including six Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982. the National Medal of Arts in 1990. and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
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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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