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.
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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,
#8101
Samuel Smiles
1812 - 1904 (92 years)
Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His primary work, Self-Help , promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and had lasting effects on British political thought.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
1605 - 1689 (84 years)
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was a 17th-century French gem merchant and traveler. Tavernier, a private individual and merchant traveling at his own expense, covered, by his own account, 60,000 leagues in making six voyages to Persia and India between the years 1630 and 1668. In 1675, Tavernier, at the behest of his patron Louis XIV, published Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier .
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G. Wilson Knight
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
George Richard Wilson Knight was an English literary critic and academic, known particularly for his interpretation of mythic content in literature, and The Wheel of Fire, a collection of essays on Shakespeare's plays. He was also an actor and theatrical director, and considered an outstanding lecturer.
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Matthew Prior
1664 - 1721 (57 years)
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner. Early life Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.
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Apostolo Zeno
1668 - 1750 (82 years)
Apostolo Zeno was a Venetian poet, librettist, journalist, and man of letters. Early life Apostolo Zeno was born in Venice to a colonial branch of the Zeno family, an ancient Venetian patrician family. His family had been transplanted from Venice to the Kingdom of Candia in the 13th century in order to maintain Venetian order and suppress any rebellious subjects. Following the assault on the island by the Ottoman Empire, the remaining members of his family returned to Venice. Upon return they were not readmitted to the patrician class, but were only able to obtain status as ordinary citizens....
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Eduard Schwartz
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Eduard Schwartz was a German classical philologist. Born in Kiel, he studied under Hermann Sauppe in Göttingen, under Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler in Bonn, under Theodor Mommsen in Berlin and under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Greifswald. In 1880 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Bonn.
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Richard Porson
1759 - 1808 (49 years)
Richard Porson was an English classical scholar. He was the discoverer of Porson's Law. The Greek typeface Porson was based on his handwriting. Early life Richard Porson was born at East Ruston, near North Walsham, Norfolk, the eldest son of Huggin Porson, parish clerk. His mother was the daughter of a shoemaker from the neighbouring village of Bacton. He was sent first to the Bacton village school, kept by John Woodrow, and then to that of Happisburgh, kept by Mr Summers, where his extraordinary powers of memory and aptitude for arithmetic were discovered. His literary skill was partly due t...
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Charles Cotton
1630 - 1687 (57 years)
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the influential The Compleat Gamester attributed to him.
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Diego de Torres Villarroel
1693 - 1770 (77 years)
Diego de Torres Villarroel was a Spanish writer, poet, dramatist, doctor, mathematician, priest and professor of the University of Salamanca. His most famous work is his autobiography, Vida, ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza y aventuras del Doctor Don Diego de Torres Villarroel .
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Thomas Kingo
1634 - 1703 (69 years)
Thomas Hansen Kingo was a Danish bishop, poet and hymnwriter born in Slangerup, near Copenhagen. His work marked the high point of Danish baroque poetry. Early life and education His parents were Hans Thomsen Kingo and Karen Sørensdatter. His father was born in Crail, Scotland, and moved to Helsingør, Denmark, as a two-year old; he became a weaver of modest means. The name Kingo is a shortening of the Scottish name Kinghorn. Although his parents were not wealthy, he was sent to Frederiksborg Latin School at the age of 16 in 1650. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, enrolling ...
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William Craigie
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-editor of the 1933 supplement. From 1916 to 1925 he was also Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. Among the students he tutored was the one who would succeed him in the Anglo-Saxon chair, J. R. R. Tolkien. He married Jessie Kinmond Hutchen of Dundee daughter of William.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Lew Wallace
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."
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Arthur Murphy
1727 - 1805 (78 years)
Arthur Murphy , also known by the pseudonym Charles Ranger, was an Irish writer. Biography Murphy was born at Cloonyquin, County Roscommon, Ireland, the son of Richard Murphy and Jane French. He studied at the Jesuit-run College of Saint-Omer, France, and was a gifted student of the Latin and Greek classics.
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William Watson Goodwin
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
William Watson Goodwin was an American classical scholar, for many years Eliot professor of Greek at Harvard University. Biography He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Hersey Bradford Goodwin and Lucrettia Watson.
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Aaron Hill
1685 - 1750 (65 years)
Aaron Hill was an English dramatist and miscellany writer. Biography The son of a country gentleman of Wiltshire, Hill was educated at Westminster School, and afterwards travelled in the East. He was the author of 17 plays, some of them, such as his versions of Voltaire's Zaire and Mérope, being adaptations. He also wrote poetry, which is of variable quality. Having written some satiric lines on Alexander Pope, he received in return a mention in The Dunciad, which led to a controversy between the two writers. Afterwards a reconciliation took place. He was a friend and correspondent of Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela he highly praised.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Erico Verissimo
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Érico Lopes Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Biography Érico Verissimo was the son of Sebastião Verissimo da Fonseca and Abegahy Lopes Verissimo. His father, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, met financial ruin during his son's youth and, as a result, Erico didn't complete secondary school because of the need to work.
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Otto Manninen
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Otto Manninen was a Finnish writer, poet, and a celebrated translator of world classics into Finnish language. Along with Eino Leino in the early 20th century, he is considered as a pioneer of Finnish poetry. Manninen translated the works of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Heine, Ibsen, Petőfi and Runeberg into Finnish.
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Melchiorre Cesarotti
1730 - 1808 (78 years)
Melchiorre Cesarotti was an Italian poet, translator and theorist. Biography He was born at Padua, of a noble but impoverished family. He studied in the Seminary of Padua, where he obtained, immediately after the end of his studies, the chair of Rhetoric. At the University of Padua his literary progress gained him the professorship of Greek and Hebrew in 1768, and then of Rhetorics and Literature in 1797. As a supporter of the Enlightenment ideas, he wrote in favor of the French on their invasion of Italy in 1797; he received a pension, and was made knight of the iron crown by Napoleon I, t...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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J. B. Bury
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
John Bagnell Bury was an Anglo-Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin , before being Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge from 1902 until his death.
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Șerban Cioculescu
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Șerban Cioculescu was a Romanian literary critic, literary historian and columnist, who held teaching positions in Romanian literature at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, as well as membership of the Romanian Academy and chairmanship of its Library. Often described as one of the most representative Romanian critics of the interwar period, he took part in the cultural debates of the age, and, as a left-wing sympathizer who supported secularism, was involved in extended polemics with the traditionalist, far right and nationalist press venues. From early on in his career, ...
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Georg Kaibel
1849 - 1901 (52 years)
Georg Kaibel was a German classical philologist born in Lübeck. He was a leading authority of Greek epigraphy and epigrammatics He studied classical philology at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. At Bonn he was a pupil of Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler. In 1872–74 he was a member of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, where he became a close associate of Theodor Mommsen and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Afterwards, he taught classes in Elberfeld and at the Askanische Oberschule in Berlin.
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Thomas Blackwell
1701 - 1757 (56 years)
Thomas Blackwell the younger was a classical scholar, historian and "one of the major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment." Life He was born on 4 August 1701 in the city of Aberdeen, son of Rev Dr Thomas Blackwell , ministers of the Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen and later Principal of Marischal College and his wife Christian Johnston . His father was Patron of the Seven Incorporated Trades of Aberdeen from 1714 to 1728.
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Philip Barry
1896 - 1949 (53 years)
Philip Jerome Quinn Barry was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday and The Philadelphia Story , which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Biography
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Eugene Field
1850 - 1895 (45 years)
Eugene Field Sr. was an American writer, best known for his children's poetry and humorous essays. He was known as the "poet of childhood". Early life and education Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri at 634 S. Broadway where today his boyhood home is open to the public as The Eugene Field House and St. Louis Toy Museum. After the death of his mother in 1856, he was raised by an aunt, Mary Field French, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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Friedrich Marx
1859 - 1941 (82 years)
Friedrich Marx was a German classical philologist born in Bessungen — today part of the city of Darmstadt. In 1877 he began his study of classical philology at the University of Giessen, then continued his education at the University of Bonn under Franz Bücheler and Hermann Usener . In 1887 he achieved his habilitation in Berlin with Johannes Vahlen , afterwards working as a professor at the Universities of Rostock , Greifswald , Breslau , Vienna , Leipzig and finally at Bonn , where in 1917-18 he served as university rector.
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Yamamoto Kenkichi
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
was the pen-name of Ishibashi Teikichi, a Japanese writer and literary critic. As a critic he wrote notable studies of Shishōsetsu as well as of the poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. He has been referred to as supportive of Shishōsetsu in an orthodox way.
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Eric P. Kelly
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Eric Philbrook Kelly was an American journalist, academic and author of children's books. He was a professor of English at Dartmouth College and briefly a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He won the 1929 Newbery Medal recognizing his first published book, The Trumpeter of Krakow, as the preceding year's most distinguished contribution to American children's literature.
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James Beattie
1735 - 1803 (68 years)
James Beattie was a Scottish poet, moralist, and philosopher. Career He became schoolmaster of the parish of Fordoun in 1753. He took the position of usher at the grammar-school of Aberdeen in 1758.
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Erich Bethe
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Erich Julius Adolf Bethe was a German classical philologist who was a native of Stettin. In 1887, he earned his doctorate from the University of Göttingen, later receiving his habilitation at Bonn in 1891. From 1893 to 1897, he was an associate professor at the University of Rostock, afterwards serving as a professor of classical philology at the Universities of Basel , Giessen and Leipzig . In 1927–28, he was rector at the University of Leipzig.
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Hergé
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Georges Prosper Remi , known by the pen name Hergé , from the French pronunciation of his reversed initials RG, was a Belgian comic strip artist. He is best known for creating The Adventures of Tintin, the series of comic albums which are considered one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. He was also responsible for two other well-known series, Quick & Flupke and The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko . His works were executed in his distinctive ligne claire drawing style.
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Hector Munro Chadwick
1870 - 1947 (77 years)
Hector Munro Chadwick was an English philologist. Chadwick was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and the founder and head of the Department for Anglo-Saxon and Kindred Studies at the University of Cambridge. Chadwick was well known for his encouragement of interdisciplinary research on Celts and Germanic peoples, and for his theories on the Heroic Age in the history of human societies. Chadwick was a tutor of many notable students and the author of numerous influential works in his fields of study. Much of his research and teaching was conducted in cooperation with his wife...
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E. T. A. Hoffmann
1776 - 1822 (46 years)
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler.
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Ramendra Sundar Tribedi
1864 - 1919 (55 years)
Ramendra Sundar Tribedi was a Bengali writer. He is known for his works in Bengali poems, and stories. He is one of the most popular poets of India. Life Ramendra Sundar Tribedi was born at Kandi, Murshidabad in West Bengal on 22 August 1864. His father's name was Govindasundar and his mother's name was Chandra Kamini. From his childhood, Tribedi was a successful student. After obtaining his B.Sc. degree , he competed for the prestigious Premchand Roychand Scholarship with physics and chemistry as his subjects. He won the scholarship . The examiners' report said:
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Santa Rita Durão
1722 - 1784 (62 years)
José de Santa Rita Durão , known simply as Santa Rita Durão, was a Colonial Brazilian Neoclassic poet, orator and Augustinian friar. He is considered a forerunner of "Indianism" in Brazilian literature, with his epic poem Caramuru.
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Kate L. Turabian
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Kate Ledgerwood Turabian was an Armenian-American educator who is best known for her book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published the 9th edition of the book. The University of Chicago Press estimates that the various editions of this book have sold more than 9 million copies since its publication in 1937. A 2016 analysis of over one million college course syllabi found that Turabian was the most commonly assigned female author due to this book.
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Patrick Hamilton
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton was an English playwright and novelist. He was well regarded by Graham Greene and J. B. Priestley, and study of his novels has been revived because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture. They display a strong sympathy for the poor, as well as an acerbic black humour. Doris Lessing wrote in The Times in 1968: "Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected".
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Karl Bartsch
1832 - 1888 (56 years)
Karl Friedrich Adolf Konrad Bartsch was a German medievalist. He studied philology at the universities of Breslau and Berlin , where he was a pupil of Wilhelm Grimm. In 1853 he received his doctorate from the University of Halle, and in 1855 began work as caretaker at the German National Museum in Nuremberg. In 1858, he was appointed professor of German and Romance philology at the University of Rostock, where he founded the first seminar for German philology. In 1871 he succeeded Adolf Holtzmann at the University of Heidelberg, where he taught till his death, shortly before what would have ...
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Rómulo Gallegos
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Rómulo Ángel del Monte Carmelo Gallegos Freire was a Venezuelan novelist and politician. For a period of nine months during 1948, he governed as the first freely elected president in Venezuela's history. He was removed from power by military officers in the 1948 Venezuelan coup.
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James Hadley
1821 - 1872 (51 years)
James Hadley was an American philologist who taught Greek and Hebrew languages at Yale College. Biography Hadley was born in Fairfield, New York, where his father was professor of chemistry at Fairfield Medical College. At the age of nine, a knee injury left him lame for life. Hadley received his early instruction at the Fairfield Academy, and also acquired some scientific knowledge from his father. He became assistant at the Academy, and later graduated from Yale College in 1842, having entered the junior class in 1840. Hadley was then a resident graduate at Yale for a year, after which he e...
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Bayard Taylor
1825 - 1878 (53 years)
Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat. As a poet, he was very popular, with a crowd of more than 4,000 attending a poetry reading once, which was a record that stood for 85 years. His travelogues were popular in both the United States and Great Britain. He served in diplomatic posts in Russia and Prussia.
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Christopher Morley
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Christopher Darlington Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures. Biography Morley was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His father, Frank Morley, was a mathematics professor at Haverford College; his mother, Lilian Janet Bird, was a violinist who provided Christopher with much of his later love for literature and poetry.
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Ion of Chios
490 BC - 422 BC (68 years)
Ion of Chios was a Greek writer, dramatist, lyric poet and philosopher. He was a contemporary of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. Of his many plays and poems only a few titles and fragments have survived. He also wrote some prose works, including a Pythagorean text, the Triagmos, of which a few fragments survive.
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Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen was a German archeologist and philologist, a specialist in Greek epigraphy. Life Hiller von Gaertringen was the son of the Prussian army officer Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen and Helene Luise Kramsta . He studied ancient history, first with Alfred von Gutschmid at Tübingen, then with Theodor Mommsen in Berlin. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1886 he continued at Göttingen with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
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Isaac Casaubon
1559 - 1614 (55 years)
Isaac Casaubon was a classical scholar and philologist, first in France and then later in England. His son Méric Casaubon was also a classical scholar. Life Early life He was born in Geneva to two French Huguenot refugees. The family returned to France after the Edict of Saint-Germain in 1562, and settled at Crest in Dauphiné, where Arnaud Casaubon, Isaac's father, became minister of a Huguenot congregation. Until he was nineteen, Isaac had no education other than that given him by his father. Arnaud was away from home for long periods in the Calvinist camp, and the family regularly fled to the hills to hide from bands of armed Catholicss who patrolled the country.
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Valerian Pereverzev
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Valerian Fedorovich Pereverzev was a Soviet literary scholar and critic. He and his associates published the 1928 collection Literary Criticism, a controversial key text in what was called the "Pereverzev school."
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Amiya Chakravarty
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Amiya Chandra Chakravarty was an Indian literary critic, academic, and Bengali poet. He was a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore, and edited several books of his poetry. He was also an associate of Gandhi, and an expert on the American catholic writer and monk, Thomas Merton. Chakravarty was honoured for his own poetry with the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. He taught literature and comparative religion in India for nearly a decade and then for more than two decades at universities in England and the U.S. In 1970, he was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Bhushan award.
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Ambrose Philips
1674 - 1749 (75 years)
Ambrose Philips was an English poet and politician. He feuded with other poets of his time, resulting in Henry Carey bestowing the nickname "Namby-Pamby" upon him, which came to mean affected, weak, and maudlin speech or verse.
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