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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8101
Brooks Otis
1908 - 1977 (69 years)
Brooks Otis was an American classicist. Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard in 1929, took the M.A. in 1930, and received the Ph.D. in 1935. Otis taught at Hobart College from 1935 to 1957, then at American University of Beirut for one year before accepting a position at Stanford University as Professor of Classics. In 1970 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he followed T. Robert S. Broughton as George L. Paddison Professor of Latin. While at Stanford Otis was one of the founders of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy, in 1965. ...
Go to Profile#8102
Robert Guy Howarth
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
#8103
John Ciardi
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio.
Go to Profile#8104
Arthur E. Gordon
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Arthur Ernest Gordon was an American classical philologist and epigraphist. Life and career Born in Marlborough, Vermont, Gordon studied classical philology at Dartmouth College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923. He continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1925 he became a lecturer in Latin at Dartmouth College and in 1928 at Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1929, where he worked with Tenney Frank, and afterwards briefly taught Latin and Ancient History at the University of Vermont. Gordon was invited to the University ...
Go to Profile#8105
Joseph Wood Krutch
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Joseph Wood Krutch was an American author, critic, and naturalist who wrote nature books on the American Southwest. He is known for developing a pantheistic philosophy. Biography Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he was educated at the University of Tennessee and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. After serving in the army in 1918, he traveled in Europe for a year with his friend, Mark Van Doren. Following World War I, he taught English composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic.
Go to Profile#8106
R. A. B. Mynors
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors was an English classicist and medievalist who held the senior chairs of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A textual critic, he was an expert in the study of manuscripts and their role in the reconstruction of classical texts.
Go to Profile#8107
Gerald Wendt
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Gerald L. Wendt was a chemist who became a writer and lecturer on popular science. He was director of science and education at the New York World's Fair, an editor at Time magazine and Science Illustrated, and worked for UNESCO.
Go to Profile#8108
Gilbert Seldes
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz . He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding...
Go to Profile#8109
Charlton Laird
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Charlton Grant Laird was an American linguist, lexicographer, novelist, and essayist. Laird created the 1971 edition of the Webster's New World Thesaurus that became the standardized edition still used today. During his lifetime, he was probably best known for his language studies: books, textbooks, and reference works elucidating the English language for the layman along with his numerous contributions to dictionaries and thesauruses.
Go to Profile#8110
Gertrude Smith
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.
Go to Profile#8111
Hyatt Howe Waggoner
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Hyatt Howe Waggoner was a professor of English. He is today best known for his work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches , Hawthorne: A Critical Study and The Presence of Hawthorne , and in 1978 played a pivotal role in the authentication of the novelist's "lost notebook". In the year of Waggoner's death, he was honoured with the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award. He did not, however, confine his output to one author: "I've moved around the field", he declared, "at the risk of being superficial." Among the other literary figures who incurred his att...
Go to Profile#8112
Louis Gernet
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Louis Gernet was a French philologist and sociologist. Life A student at the École Normale Supérieure , he received a licentiate in law and agrégation in grammar. In 1917, supported by the Fondation Thiers, he received his doctorate in letters with a dissertation entitled "Researches on the development of legal and moral thought in Greece".
Go to Profile#8113
Otto Skutsch
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Otto Skutsch was a German-born British classicist and academic, specialising in classical philosophy. He was Professor of Latin at University College London from 1951 to 1972. Early life Skutsch was born on 6 December 1906 in Breslau, then in the German Empire. He was the third child of Franz Skutsch, a German classical philologist. He was six years old when his father died. He was educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Breslau. He then studied at the University of Breslau, the University of Kiel, the University of Berlin, and the University of Göttingen. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1934.
Go to Profile#8114
Gabriel Turville-Petre
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born at Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire to a prominent Roman Catholic family, Turville-Petre was educated in English at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of J. R. R. Tolkien. He eventually became Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford and a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research. He was the husband of fellow philologist Joan Turville-Petre, who was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at Oxford. Turville-Pet...
Go to Profile#8115
Nicholas Vakar
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Nicholas P. Vakar , Belarusian, author of Belorussia: The Making of a Nation. Harvard U. Press. 1956 and The Taproot of Soviet Society. Harper. 1959. A Word Count of Spoken Russian. OSU Press, 1966.
Go to Profile#8116
Yoo Juhyun
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
Yoo Juhyun was a South Korean novelist. He was a prolific writer, having written 26 full-length novels and over 100 novellas and short stories. His early works were mostly devoted to social issues, but the majority of his works since the 1960s are historical novels. Unlike conventional historical novels that focus on entertainment, his novels feature profound historical perspectives. His representative work Joseonchongdokbu has received critical attention for its realistic depiction of the Korean people’s sufferings during the 36 years of Japanese colonial rule.
Go to Profile#8117
William Sale Jr.
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
William Merritt Sale Jr. was a professor of English at Cornell University, considered an authority on 18th-century English literature. After studying at Yale, where Chauncey Brewster Tinker directed his thesis, Sale went on to join the faculty at Cornell in 1936. Named Goldwin Smith Professor of English in 1959, he was named professor emeritus upon retirement in 1968.
Go to Profile#8118
S. Foster Damon
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Samuel Foster Damon was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. When remembered as a Blake scholar, he is often compared in importance to Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman.
Go to Profile#8119
Charles Upson Clark
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Charles Upson Clark was a professor of history at Columbia University. He discovered the Barberini Codex, the earliest Aztec writings on herbal medicines extant. Biography Clark was born in 1875 to Edward Perkins Clark and Catharine Pickens Upson. Throughout his life he was the author of many books on a variety of subjects. Among them was the history of West Indies by Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa translated into English, and the modern history of Romania.
Go to Profile#8120
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.
Go to Profile#8121
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.
Go to Profile#8122
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.
Go to Profile#8123
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.
Go to Profile#8124
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.
Go to Profile#8125
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. ...
Go to Profile#8126
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.
Go to Profile#8127
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.
Go to Profile#8128
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
Go to Profile#8129
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.
Go to Profile#8130
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.
Go to Profile#8131
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.
Go to Profile#8132
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...
Go to Profile#8133
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.
Go to Profile#8134
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.
Go to Profile#8135
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.
Go to Profile#8136
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.
Go to Profile#8137
Leiv Amundsen
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Leiv Amundsen was a Norwegian librarian and philologist. He was born in Tjøme as a son of sailmaker Carl Amundsen and Henrikke Elise Andersen . He attended upper secondary school in Drammen, and worked at the University Library of Oslo at the same time as studying classical philology at the Royal Frederick University. He never actually graduated from the university, but was instead promoted manager of the manuscript collection at the University Library in 1923. He specialized in papyrology, first as the assistant of Samson Eitrem. He was a research fellow with Rockefeller grants from 1926 to 1929, and studied abroad.
Go to Profile#8138
Benedict Wallet Vilakazi
1906 - 1947 (41 years)
Benedict Wallet Vilakazi was a South African novelist, linguist, a descendant of the Zulu royal family, and a radically innovative poet who created a combination of traditional and Romantic poetry in the Zulu language. Vilakazi was also a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became the first Black South African to teach University classes to White South Africans. In 1946, Vilakazi also became the first Black South African to receive a PhD.
Go to Profile#8139
Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
Go to Profile#8140
Walter Clyde Curry
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Walter Clyde Curry was an American academic, medievalist, and poet. He was a member of the Fugitives and the author of four books. Early life Walter Clyde Curry was born in 1887 in Gray Court, South Carolina. He graduated from Wofford College, and he earned a master's degree and PhD from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#8141
Stephen Leacock
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humorist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.
Go to Profile#8142
Rudolf Tombo Jr.
1875 - 1914 (39 years)
Rudolf Tombo Jr. was a German-born American philologist who was associate professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University. Biography Rudolf Tombo Jr. was born in Barmen, Germany, on October 24, 1875. His father, Rudolf Tombo Sr, was a graduate of the University of Rostock and an instructor in German. As a child Tombo Jr. accompanied his family to the United States, where his father held positions at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#8143
Moses Finley
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Sir Moses Israel Finley was an American-born British academic and classical scholar. His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security during the 1950s, resulted in his relocation to England, where he became an English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable publication is The Ancient Economy in which he argued that the economy in antiquity was governed by status and civic ideology, rather than rational economic motivations.
Go to Profile#8144
Walter Baetke
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Walter Hugo Hermann Baetke was a German historian of religion who specialized in Germanic studies. He was Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Leipzig. Life and career Baetke's father, Wilhelm Baetke, was a police official. Baetke attended a gymnasium in Stettin. From 1902 to 1907, Baetke studied Germanic studies, English studies, education and philosophy at the Universities of Halle and Berlin, graduating from Halle in 1907 with a qualification to teach in higher education and earning a doctorate in English there in 1908 with a thesis on children in the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors.
Go to Profile#8145
Elizabeth Hazelton Haight
1872 - 1964 (92 years)
Elizabeth Hazelton "Hazel" Haight was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Latin teaching. She spent most of her career working for Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Haight was the second female president of the American Philological Association, and first woman to chair the Advisory Council of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. She published eleven books in the field of Classics, as well as histories of Vassar and James Monroe Taylor. Her works focused on Latin Literature and the Greek novel, before she began the study of symbolism in Latin literature in her final publications.
Go to Profile#8146
George Abbe
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
George Bancroft Abbe was an American poet and novelist. Life He was graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1933 and from the University of Iowa in 1938. He taught at Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, University of Connecticut, Wayne State University, Columbia University, University of Maine, Springfield College, Central Connecticut State College, Russell Sage College, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
Go to Profile#8147
Israel Davidson
1870 - 1939 (69 years)
Israel Davidson was an American writer and publisher of Lithuanian Jewish heritage. He has been recognized as one of the leading American Hebrew writers in his era. His magnum opus was the four volume Otsar ha-shirah veha-piyut = Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry .
Go to Profile#8148
Melville Richards
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Grafton Melville Richards was a Welsh scholar in the field of Welsh language and literature and Celtic studies. Early life He was born on 29 September 1910 as the third son of William and Elizabeth Richards in Ffair-fach, Llandybie, Llandeilo, Carms. Grafton Melville Richards married Ethyn Anne Bowen in Llanelli in July 1939 and had a son and daughter. He was educated at Neath Grammar School and went onto achieve a first-class Honours degree in Welsh from the University College of Swansea, starting in 1928 and finishing in 1931.
Go to Profile#8149
Howard Spring
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Howard Spring was a Welsh author and journalist who wrote in English. He began his writing career as a journalist but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels for adults and children. The most successful was Fame Is the Spur , which was later adapted into a film starring Michael Redgrave and, later still a BBC TV series starring Tim Pigott-Smith and David Hayman.
Go to Profile#8150
Eleanor Duckett
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...
Go to Profile