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,
#801
Adrian Henri
#11266
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symboli...
Go to Profile#802
Jonathan Coe
#13145
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s.
Go to Profile#803
Edwin Thumboo
#9061
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Edwin Nadason Thumboo B.B.M. is a Singaporean poet and academic who is regarded as one of the pioneers of English literature in Singapore. Thumboo graduated in English from the University of Malaya in 1956. Although he applied for a position at the university, he was rejected as few locals held academic posts at that time. He therefore worked in the civil service for about nine years before finally joining the university, then renamed the University of Singapore, in 1966 following Singapore's independence. He received a Ph.D. from the university in 1970. Thumboo rose to the position of full p...
Go to Profile#804
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
#20998
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. She began her career writing short stories and plays, which were often censored by the Soviet government, and following perestroika, published a number of well-respected works of prose.
Go to Profile#805
Nathan Zach
#15473
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Nathan Zach was an Israeli poet. Widely regarded as one of the preeminent poets in the country's history, he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1995 for poetry. He was also the recipient of other national and international awards. Zach was a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa.
Go to Profile#806
Ruth Padel
#16911
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
Go to Profile#807
Maria Tatar
#15524
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Maria Magdalene Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#808
Sri Chinmoy
#4306
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Chinmoy Kumar Ghose , better known as Sri Chinmoy, was an Indian spiritual leader who taught meditation in the United States after moving to New York City in 1964. Chinmoy established his first meditation center in Queens, New York, and eventually had 7,000 students in 60 countries. A prolific author, artist, poet, and musician, he also held public events such as concerts and meditations on the theme of inner peace. Chinmoy advocated a spiritual path to God through prayer and meditation. He advocated athleticism including distance running, swimming, and weightlifting. He organized marathons and other races, and was an active runner and, following a knee injury, weightlifter.
Go to Profile#809
Aleksandar Hemon
#13502
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project , and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections .
Go to Profile#810
Jimmy McGovern
#7037
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James Stanley McGovern is an English screenwriter and producer. He is best known for creating the drama series Cracker , for which he received two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He also received recognition for creating drama series such as Hillsborough, The Lakes, The Street, and Accused, among others. On 8 December 2021 Jimmy was conferred the Freedom of Liverpool, in recognition of his life's work.
Go to Profile#811
Patrick Modiano
#8212
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jean Patrick Modiano , generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.
Go to Profile#812
Marlene van Niekerk
#17716
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Marlene van Niekerk is a South African poet, writer, and academic. She is best known for her novels, the satirical tragicomedy Triomf and the Hertzog-winning Agaat , which explore themes including the family, the change in power dynamics occasioned by the end of Apartheid, and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Van Niekerk is also an award-winning poet. She writes in her native tongue, Afrikaans, and teaches at Stellenbosch University.
Go to Profile#813
William Kennedy
#9994
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed. Kennedy's other works include The Ink Truck , Legs , Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , Roscoe and Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes . Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York.
Go to Profile#814
John Gross
#14803
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
John Gross FRSL was an eminent English man of letters. A leading intellectual, writer, anthologist, and critic, The Guardian and The Spectator were among several publications to describe Gross as "the best-read man in Britain". The Guardians obituarist Ion Trewin wrote: "Mr Gross is one good argument for the survival of the species", a comment Gross would have disliked since he was known for his modesty. Charles Moore wrote in The Spectator: "I am left with the irritated sense that he was under-appreciated. He was too clever, too witty, too modest for our age."
Go to Profile#815
Karl Kroeber
#19897
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Karl Kroeber was an American literary scholar, known for his writing on the English Romantics and American Indian literature. He was the son of Theodora and Alfred L. Kroeber, both anthropologists. He wrote an account of his father's work with Ishi called Ishi in Three Centuries.
Go to Profile#816
Hugo Claus
#12784
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Hugo Maurice Julien Claus was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director. He wrote primarily in Dutch, although he also wrote some poetry in English. He won the 2000 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Go to Profile#817
Cynthia Haven
#8768
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. Her books include of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the top books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and a visiting scholar at Stanford Un...
Go to Profile#818
Karel Appel
#4672
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Go to Profile#819
Mark Greif
#11262
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Mark Greif is an author, educator and cultural critic. His most recent book is Against Everything. One of the co-founders of n+1, he is a frequent contributor to the magazine and writes for numerous other publications. Greif currently teaches English at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#820
Ray Bradbury
#10971
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Go to Profile#821
Tim Winton
#12641
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Timothy John Winton is an Australian writer. He has written novels, children's books, non-fiction books, and short stories. In 1997, he was named a Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia, and has won the Miles Franklin Award four times.
Go to Profile#822
Wang Xiaobo
#10768
Overall Influence
1952 - 1997 (45 years)
Wang Xiaobo was a renowned contemporary Chinese novelist and essayist from Beijing. Wang was born into a family of Intellectuals in Beijing. he was transferred to a collective farm in Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution, which later became the writing background for his most famous novel Golden Age. This novel won him the 1991 United Daily News novella award. In just a few years he wrote an avalanche of novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles, especially popular among young people. He died of heart attack in 1997.
Go to Profile#823
Harry Crews
#17467
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
Harry Eugene Crews was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He often made use of violent, grotesque characters and set them in regions of the Deep South. Life Harry Crews was born June 7, 1935, during the Great Depression to two poor tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died while he was still a baby, and his mother soon remarried to his father's brother. Crews was unaware that this man was not his biological father until years later.
Go to Profile#824
Stanley Wells
#12459
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Sir Stanley William Wells, is an English Shakespearean scholar, writer, professor and editor who has been honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, professor emeritus at Birmingham University, and author of many books about Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Sex and Love, and is general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and New Penguin Shakespeare series. He lives in Stratford-upon-Avon and was educated in English at University College, London .
Go to Profile#825
Michelle Cliff
#18662
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng , No Telephone to Heaven , and Free Enterprise . In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various complex identity problems that stem from the experience of post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic individual identity in the face of race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives....
Go to Profile#826
Richard Foreman
#8038
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Achievements and awards Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, both in New York City and abroad. He has received three Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year, and received four other Obies for directing and for sustained achievement. Foreman has received the annual Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center Mast...
Go to Profile#827
Ernest J. Gaines
#14950
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Ernest James Gaines was an American author whose works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works were made into television movies.
Go to Profile#828
David Ives
#6188
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Ives is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays; The New York Times in 1997 referred to him as the "maestro of the short form". Ives has also written dramatic plays, narrative stories, and screenplays, has adapted French 17th and 18th-century classical comedies, and adapted 33 musicals for New York City's Encores! series.
Go to Profile#829
David G. Hartwell
#10367
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Go to Profile#830
Earle Birney
#16419
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Earle Alfred Birney was a Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honour, for his poetry. Life Born in Calgary in the North-West Territories' District of Alberta, and raised on a farm in Erickson, near Creston, British Columbia, his childhood was somewhat isolated. After working as a farm hand, a bank clerk, and a park ranger, Birney went on to college to study chemical engineering but graduated with a degree in English. He studied at the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of California, Berkeley and University of London.
Go to Profile#831
Louis Simpson
#13874
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Louis Aston Marantz Simpson was an American poet born in Jamaica. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At the End of the Open Road. Life and career Simpson was born in Jamaica, the son of Rosalind and Aston Simpson, a lawyer. His father was of Scottish and African ancestry. His mother was born in Russia . At the age of 17, he emigrated to the United States and began attending Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945 he was a member of the elite 101st Airborne Division and would fight in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
Go to Profile#832
Barry N. Malzberg
#10202
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Barry Nathaniel Malzberg is an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and fantasy. Biography Malzberg originated from a Jewish family and graduated from Syracuse University in 1960. He worked as an investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare in 1961–1962 and 1963–1964. In 1963, he was employed as a reimbursement agent for the New York State Department of Mental Health. He married Joyce Zelnick in 1964.
Go to Profile#833
Mehrdad Avesta
#12734
Overall Influence
1930 - 1991 (61 years)
Mehrdad Avesta was an Iranian poet. He was born in Borujerd into a literature and art-oriented family. When he was young, he changed his first name from Mohammad Reza to Mehrdad and his family name from Rahmani to Avesta in order to show his passion for ancient Persian culture.
Go to Profile#834
Annie Dillard
#12388
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#835
Shūsaku Endō
#17074
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
was a Japanese author who wrote from the rare perspective of a Japanese Catholic. Internationally, he is known for his 1966 historical fiction novel Silence, which was adapted into a 2016 film of the same name by director Martin Scorsese. He was the laureate of several prestigious literary accolades, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Order of Culture, and was inducted into the Roman Catholic Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Paul VI.
Go to Profile#836
Norma Alarcón
#14592
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Norma Alarcón is a Chicana author and publisher in the United States. She is the founder of Third Woman Press and a major figure in Chicana feminism. She is Professor Emerita of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#837
Hiromi Itō
#24738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Hiromi Itō is one of the most prominent women writers of contemporary Japan, with more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, numerous books of essays, and several major literary prizes to her name. She divides her time between the towns of Encinitas, California and Kumamoto in southern Japan. She is currently teaching at School of Culture, Media and Society in Waseda University, Tokyo.
Go to Profile#838
David Adams Leeming
#24167
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David Adams Leeming is an American philologist who is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, and a specialist in comparative literature of mythology.
Go to Profile#839
R. W. B. Lewis
#15242
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
Go to Profile#840
Thomas Kinsella
#10214
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Thomas Kinsella was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and, around the same time, translated early Irish poetry into English. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States to teach English at universities including Temple University. Kinsella continued to publish steadily until the 2010s.
Go to Profile#841
Richard Eberhart
#11906
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romantic sensibilities." He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1930–1965 and the 1977 National Book Award for Poetry for Collected Poems, 1930–1976. He was the grandfather of Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington.
Go to Profile#842
Seymour Chatman
#13104
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most significant figures of American narratology , regarded as a prominent representative of its Structuralist or "classic" branch.
Go to Profile#843
Enrique Laguerre
#21579
Overall Influence
1905 - 2005 (100 years)
Enrique Arturo Laguerre Vélez was a teacher, novelist, playwright, critic, and newspaper columnist from Moca, Puerto Rico. He is the author of the 1935 novel La Llamarada , which has been for many years obligatory reading in many literature courses in Puerto Rico.
Go to Profile#844
Hualing Nieh Engle
#22072
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Hualing Nieh Engle , née Nieh Hua-ling , is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa. Early life and education Nieh Hua-ling was born on 11 January 1925 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In 1936, Nieh's father, an official of the Kuomintang administration, was executed by the Communist Red Army during the Chinese Civil War.
Go to Profile#845
Otohiko Kaga
#10311
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Otohiko Kaga was a Japanese author. Biography Kaga was born in Tokyo, and studied psychiatry and criminology at the University of Tokyo Medical School. He worked in a hospital and then prison before going to France in 1957 for further studies. After returning to Japan in 1960, Kaga took up university teaching, and was a psychology professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Sophia University .
Go to Profile#846
Sarah Ruhl
#7931
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice , The Clean House , and In the Next Room . She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Record...
Go to Profile#847
Haki R. Madhubuti
#22861
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Haki R. Madhubuti is an African-American author, educator, and poet, as well as a publisher and operator of black-themed bookstore. He is particularly recognized in connection with the founding in 1967 of Third World Press, considered the oldest independent black publishing house in the United States.
Go to Profile#848
Irving Layton
#9065
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Irving Peter Layton, OC was a Romanian-born Canadian poet. He was known for his "tell it like it is" style which won him a wide following but also made him enemies. As T. Jacobs notes in his biography , Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life:
Go to Profile#849
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#15678
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels , as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Go to Profile#850
Tracy K. Smith
#17086
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
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