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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#7701
Horst Frenz
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Horst Frenz was a German-American literary scholar and a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University. He is known for his works on comparative literature.
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Frederick Morgan Padelford
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Frederick Morgan Padelford , pronounced Pa-DEL-ford, was an American professor and author. He worked at the University of Washington in Seattle for 41 years. He chaired the English Department and served as dean of the graduate school. The Orbis Cascade Alliance has a collection of his papers.
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Edward Surtz
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Edward L. Surtz, SJ was a professor at Loyola University Chicago and, at the time of his death, rector of the Jesuit house at the university. Life Surtz was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 5, 1909. After graduating B.A. from John Carrol University in 1931, Surtz joined the Society of Jesus and went on to study at Xavier University, graduating M.A. in 1934. "The Religious Aspect of the Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins" was his master thesis. He was ordained as a priest in 1942, and obtained a doctorate in English from Harvard University in 1948.
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Ignacio Bolívar
1850 - 1944 (94 years)
Ignacio Bolívar y Urrutia was a Spanish naturalist and entomologist, and one of the founding fathers of Spanish entomology. He helped found the Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural in 1871, and was the author of several books and of over 1000 species.
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Henry Seidel Canby
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Henry Seidel Canby was a critic, editor, and Yale University professor. A scion of a Quaker family that arrived in Wilmington, Delaware, around 1740 and grew to regional prominence through milling and business affairs, Henry Seidel Canby was a son of Edward T. Canby. Canby was born in Wilmington, and attended Wilmington Friends School. He graduated from Yale in 1899, then taught at the university until becoming a professor in 1922.
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Otto Brendel
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...
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Charlton Hinman
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman was the editor of the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles and The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare. He is well known as the inventor of the Hinman Collator. Hinman attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, receiving both his bachelor's and master's degrees there. He later received his doctoral degree in 1941 from the University of Virginia, as Fredson Bowers' first Ph.D. candidate. He was associated with the Folger Shakespeare Library and was professor of English at the University of Kansas from 1960 to 1976.
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Marguerite Yourcenar
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980.
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Alfred Paul Dorjahn
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Alfred Paul Dorjahn was an American classicist. In 1924 he completed his PhD at the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation was The Athenian Political Amnesty of 403 BC. External links Review of Forgiveness in old Athens. The Amnesty of 403BCby Dorjahn , Cloché Paul, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 1949, Volume 27, Numéro 1, pp. 221–223
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A. Y. Campbell
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Archibald Young Campbell was a classical scholar, translator, and published poet of the 1920s and 1930s. Life Campbell was born at Blantyre, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1885, and received his education at Hamilton Academy and Fettes College, in Edinburgh.
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Charles Christopher Mierow
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Charles Christopher Mierow was an American academic and classical scholar. He had a Princeton Ph.D. in classical languages and literature, and was known as a translator. In years the 1923-1924 and 1925-1934 he was president of Colorado College. He was appointed professor of biography at Carleton College, a position he held from 1935 to 1951.
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Thomas Marc Parrott
1866 - 1960 (94 years)
Thomas Marc Parrott was a prominent twentieth-century American literary scholar, long a member of the faculty of Princeton University in New Jersey. Life and work T. M. Parrott was born and raised in Ohio, the son of Col. Edwin A. Parrott, Civil War veteran, politician , and centenarian. The younger Parrott graduated from the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton, in 1888, and was head of the preparatory department of Miami University from 1888-1890. At Miami, he was considered part of the "dude faculty" of young eastern professors brought to the school upon its reopening after a twelve-year hiatus.
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Arno Schirokauer
1899 - 1954 (55 years)
Arno Fritz Kurt Schirokauer was a German-Jewish literary scholar, best known for his biography of Ferdinand Lassalle. In 1939, Schirokauer managed to travel to Havana, Cuba and on to Memphis. There he taught at Southwestern College as a Visiting Lecturer in Medieval Studies - his salary provided by other Jews in Memphis, since college rules prohibited non-Christian faculty - until he moved on to the Carl Schurz Foundation of Philadelphia. He taught at Yale University from 1941 to 1943, at Kenyon College from 1943 to 1944, at Yale again 1944 to 1945, and at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 u...
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Vivian Mercier
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born at Clara in County Offaly and educated, first, at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and then, at Trinity College Dublin. He was elected a Scholar of the college in 1938, and edited the student magazine T.C.D. Miscellany.
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Walker Percy
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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Roger Burlingame
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
William Roger Burlingame was a prolific author, writer, and biographer. Burlingame served as the book editor at Scribner's Magazine . After leaving his job at Scribner's, Burlingame authored 25 books, including biographies and works of historical non-fiction. He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.
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Hutton Webster
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
David Hutton Webster was an American sociologist, economist and anthropologist. He was Lecturer Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University. Biography David Hutton Webster was born in Malone, New York on March 24, 1875. He went to California in 1893, receiving a A. B. from Stanford University in 1896, where he subsequently served as an assistant in economics from 1899 to 1900. From 1902 he was a teaching fellow in economics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1904. For the next three years Webster was Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
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Jean Paulhan
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie française. He was born in Nîmes and died in Paris.
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Louis L'Amour
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels, though he called his work "frontier stories". His most widely known Western fiction works include Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Hondo, Shalako, and the Sackett series. L'Amour also wrote historical fiction , science fiction , non-fiction , and poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. His books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death, almost all of his 105 existing works were still in...
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Anna Laetitia Barbauld
1743 - 1825 (82 years)
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career that spanned more than half a century.
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Julian Tuwim
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Julian Tuwim , known also under the pseudonym "Oldlen" as a lyricist, was a Polish poet, born in Łódź, then part of the Russian Partition. He was educated in Łódź and in Warsaw where he studied law and philosophy at Warsaw University. After Poland's return to independence in 1918, Tuwim co-founded the Skamander group of experimental poets with Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. He was a major figure in Polish literature, admired also for his contribution to children's literature. He was a recipient of the prestigious Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1935.
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Johann Heinrich Voss
1751 - 1826 (75 years)
Johann Heinrich Voss was a German classicist and poet, known mostly for his translation of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad into German. Life Voss was born at Sommersdorf in Mecklenburg-Strelitz as the son of a farmer. After attending the Gymnasium at Neubrandenburg from 1766–1769, he was obliged to accept a private tutorship in order to earn money to enable him to study at a university.
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Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Life He was born Tadeu Hâjdeu in Cristineștii Hotinului , northern Bessarabia, at the time part of Imperial Russia. His father was the writer Alexandru Hâjdeu, a descendant of the Hâjdău family of Moldovan boyars, with noted Polish connections.
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Lion Feuchtwanger
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. Feuchtwanger's Judaism and fierce criticism of the Nazi Party, years before it assumed power, ensured that he would be a target of government-sponsored persecution after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Following a brief period of internment in France and a harrowing escape from continental Europe, he found asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.
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Vatroslav Jagić
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Vatroslav Jagić was a Croatian scholar of Slavic studies in the second half of the 19th century. Life Jagić was born in Varaždin, where he attended the elementary school and is the place where he started his secondary-school education. He finished that level of education at the Gymnasium in Zagreb. Having a particular interest in philology, he moved to Vienna, where he was lectured in Slavic studies under the guidance of Franz Miklosich. He continued his studies and defended his doctoral dissertation Das Leben der Wurzel 'dê in Croatischen Sprachen in Leipzig in 1871.
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Guy Bolton
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Guy Reginald Bolton was an Anglo-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the US, he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the US, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby ...
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Oswald de Andrade
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Modern Art Week .
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Maironis
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Maironis was a Lithuanian Roman Catholic priest and the greatest and most-known Lithuanian poet, especially of the period of the Lithuanian press ban. He was called the Bard of Lithuanian National Revival . Maironis was active in public life. However, the Lithuanian literary historian Juozas Brazaitis writes that Maironis was not.
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Pierre de Ronsard
1524 - 1585 (61 years)
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets". Ronsard was born at Manoir de la Possonnière in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, Vendômois. His father served Francis I as maître d'hôtel du roi. Ronsard received an education at home before attending the College of Navarre in Paris at age nine. He later travelled extensively, including visits to Scotland, Flanders, and Holland. After a hearing impairment halted his diplomatic career, Ronsard dedicated himself to study at the Collège Coqueret.
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François-René de Chateaubriand
1768 - 1848 (80 years)
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe , published posthumously in 1849–1850.
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Ferenc Molnár
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Ferenc Molnár , often anglicized as Franz Molnar, was a Hungarian-born author, stage director, dramatist, and poet, widely regarded as Hungary's most celebrated and controversial playwright. His primary aim through his writing was to entertain by transforming his personal experiences into literary works of art. He never connected to any one literary movement. However, he did utilize the precepts of naturalism, Neo-Romanticism, Expressionism, and Freudian psychoanalytic theories, but only as long as they suited his desires. "By fusing the realistic narrative and stage tradition of Hungary with ...
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Hayim Nahman Bialik
1873 - 1934 (61 years)
Hayim Nahman Bialik was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to a new spirit of his time, and recognized today as Israel's national poet. Being a noted essayist and story-teller, Bialik also translated major works from European languages.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Henrik Wergeland
1808 - 1845 (37 years)
Henrik Arnold Thaulow Wergeland was a Norwegian writer, most celebrated for his poetry but also a prolific playwright, polemicist, historian, and linguist. He is often described as a leading pioneer in the development of a distinctly Norwegian literary heritage and of modern Norwegian culture.
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Edgar Wallace
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure and sci-fi novels, plays and stories. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men . Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised shor...
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Valerius Maximus
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Valerius Maximus was a 1st-century Latin writer and author of a collection of historical anecdotes: . He worked during the reign of Tiberius . During the Middle Ages, Valerius Maximus was one of the most copied Latin prose authors, second only to Priscian. More than 600 medieval manuscripts of his books have survived as a result.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
1613 - 1680 (67 years)
François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac was an accomplished French moralist of the era of French Classical literature and author of Maximes and Memoirs, the only two works of his dense literary œuvre published. His Maximes portrays the callous nature of human conduct, with a cynical attitude towards putative virtue and avowals of affection, friendship, love, and loyalty. Leonard Tancock regards Maximes as "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature", with his "experience, his likes and dislikes, sufferings and petty spites ...
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Naomi Mitchison
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
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Poliziano
1454 - 1494 (40 years)
Agnolo Ambrogini , commonly known as Angelo Poliziano or simply Poliziano, anglicized as Politian, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano .
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Gil Vicente
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Gil Vicente , called the Trobadour, was a Portuguese playwright and poet who acted in and directed his own plays. Considered the chief dramatist of Portugal he is sometimes called the "Portuguese Plautus," often referred to as the "Father of Portuguese drama" and as one of Western literature's greatest playwrights. Also noted as a lyric poet, Vicente worked in Spanish as much as he worked in Portuguese and is thus, with Juan del Encina, considered joint-father of Spanish drama.
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Frank O'Hara
1926 - 1966 (40 years)
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
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Molière
1622 - 1673 (51 years)
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin , known by his stage name Molière , was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the "language of Molière".
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Donald Barthelme
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction , and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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François Mauriac
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française , and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.
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Patrick Kavanagh
1904 - 1967 (63 years)
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.
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William Langland
1332 - 1386 (54 years)
William Langland is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman.
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Georg Wissowa
1859 - 1931 (72 years)
Georg Otto August Wissowa was a German classical philologist born in Neudorf, near Breslau. Education and career Wissowa studied classical philology under August Reifferscheid at the University of Breslau from 1876 to 1880, then furthered his studies in Munich under Heinrich Brunn, a leading authority on Roman antiquities. Having obtained his habilitation at the University of Breslau in 1882, he received a travel scholarship from the German Archaeological Institute and went to Italy for a year. After that he taught as Privatdozent in Breslau from 1883 to 1886, when he accepted a chair at the University of Marburg where he was awarded a full professorship in 1890.
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Ernst Robert Curtius
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Ernst Robert Curtius was a German literary scholar, philologist, and Romance languages literary critic, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
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Ioan Slavici
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Ioan Slavici was a Romanian writer and journalist from Austria-Hungary, later Romania. He made his debut in Convorbiri literare , with the comedy Fata de birău . Alongside Mihai Eminescu he founded the Young Romania Social and Literary Academic Society and organized, in 1871, the Putna Celebration of the Romanian Students from Romania and from abroad. At the end of 1874, he settled in Bucharest, where he became secretary of the Hurmuzachi Collection Committee, then he became a professor, and then an editor of the newspaper Timpul . Alongside Ion Luca Caragiale and George Coșbuc, he edited the Vatra magazine.
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Jørgen Moe
1813 - 1882 (69 years)
Jørgen Engebretsen Moe was a Norwegian folklorist, bishop, poet, and author. He is best known for the Norske Folkeeventyr, a collection of Norwegian folk tales which he edited in collaboration with Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. He also served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Kristianssand from 1874 until his death in 1882.
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