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,
#8151
Edmond de Goncourt
1822 - 1896 (74 years)
Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt. Biography Goncourt was born in Nancy. His parents, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt and Annette-Cécile de Goncourt , were minor aristocrats who died when he and his brother Jules de Goncourt were young adults. His father was a former cavalry officer and squadron commander in the Grande Armée of Napoleon I, and his grandfather Jean-Antoine Huot de Goncourt had been a deputy in the National Assembly of 1789. Edmond attended the pension Goubaux, the Lycée Henri IV, and the Lycée Condorcet.
Go to Profile#8152
Paul Lafargue
1842 - 1911 (69 years)
Paul Lafargue was a Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist socialist, political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Saint Dominican Creole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by a suicide pact.
Go to Profile#8153
Edmond Malone
1741 - 1812 (71 years)
Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare. Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he frequented literary and artistic circles. He regularly visited Samuel Johnson and was of great assistance to James Boswell in revising and proofreading his Life, four of the later editions of which he annotated. He was friendly with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and sat for a portrait now in the National Portrai...
Go to Profile#8154
Mór Jókai
1825 - 1904 (79 years)
Móricz Jókay of Ásva , known as Mór Jókai, was a Hungarian novelist, dramatist and revolutionary. Outside of Hungary, he was also known as Maurice Jókai or Maurus Jokai or Mauritius Jókai. He was a leader of the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 in Pest. His romantic novels became widely popular among the elite of Victorian England, where he was often compared to Charles Dickens by the press. One of his most famous admirers was Queen Victoria herself.
Go to Profile#8155
Robert Gordon Latham
1812 - 1888 (76 years)
Robert Gordon Latham FRS was an English ethnologist and philologist. Early life The eldest son of Thomas Latham, vicar of Billingborough, Lincolnshire, he was born there on 24 March 1812. He entered Eton College in 1819, and in 1829 went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, and was soon afterwards elected a Fellow.
Go to Profile#8156
Henry Morley
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Henry Morley was an English academic who was one of the earliest professors of English literature in Great Britain. Morley wrote a popular book containing biographies of famous English writers. Life The son of apothecary Henry Morley, the younger Morley was born in Hatton Garden, London. He was educated at a Moravian Church school in Neuwied, Germany at the age of ten, from 1833 to 1835, then he attended a preparatory school in Stockwell and entered King's College London in 1838 for medical studies. Morley graduated in 1843 and became part of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, a profess...
Go to Profile#8157
Arkady Gornfeld
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld was a prominent Russian essayist, literary critic and translator, best known for a feud with dissident poet Osip Mandelstam. Life and work Arkady G. Gornfeld was born in 1867 in Sevastopol, the son of a notary. After his childhood in Ukraine, he went on to study philology, literature and psychology at Kharkov University and Berlin University. He then embarked on a career writing for various publications, including Russkoye Bogatstvo .
Go to Profile#8158
Tomás Rivera
1935 - 1984 (49 years)
Tomás Rivera was a Mexican American author, poet, and educator. He was born in Texas to migrant farm workers, and worked in the fields as a young boy. However, he achieved social mobility through education—earning a degree at Southwest Texas State University , and later a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oklahoma—and came to believe strongly in the virtues of education for Mexican-Americans.
Go to Profile#8159
Sakutarō Hagiwara
1886 - 1942 (56 years)
Sakutarō Hagiwara was a Japanese writer of free verse, active in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the "father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan". He published many volumes of essays, literary and cultural criticism, and aphorisms over his long career. His unique style of verse expressed his doubts about existence, and his fears, ennui, and anger through the use of dark images and unambiguous wording.
Go to Profile#8160
Swami Vipulananda
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Swami Vipulananda , also known as Vipulananda Adigal, was a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu social reformer, literary critic, author, poet, teacher and ascetic from the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Vipulananda was an early pioneer associated with the Indian-based Ramakrishna Mission in Sri Lanka. Along with other reformers, Vipulananda was instrumental in the revival of the Hindu religion and native traditions in Sri Lanka after a long period of dormancy and decline during the previous 500 years of colonial rule by various European powers.
Go to Profile#8161
Ahmad Javad
1892 - 1937 (45 years)
Ahmad Javad was an Azerbaijani poet who is best known for writing the words of the National Anthem of Azerbaijan used under the 1918–1920 Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, and again since 1991, and another poem named Chirpynirdi gara deniz. He was later arrested by the Soviet regime and executed on October 13, 1937, accused of trying to spread Musavat-inspired nationalism to young Azerbaijani poets.
Go to Profile#8162
Nathanael West
1903 - 1940 (37 years)
Nathanael West was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust , set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.
Go to Profile#8163
John Wilson
1785 - 1854 (69 years)
John Wilson of Elleray FRSE was a Scottish advocate, literary critic and author, the writer most frequently identified with the pseudonym Christopher North of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. He was professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1820 to 1851.
Go to Profile#8164
C. J. Dennis
1876 - 1938 (62 years)
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis , better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet and journalist known for his best-selling verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke . Alongside his contemporaries and occasional collaborators Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, Dennis helped popularise Australian slang in literature, earning him the title 'the laureate of the larrikin'.
Go to Profile#8165
John Leland
1502 - 1552 (50 years)
John Leland or Leyland was an English poet and antiquary. Leland has been described as "the father of English local history and bibliography". His Itinerary provided a unique source of observations and raw materials for many subsequent antiquaries, and introduced the county as the basic unit for studying the local history of England, an idea that has been influential ever since.
Go to Profile#8166
Carl Van Doren
1885 - 1950 (65 years)
Carl Clinton Van Doren was an American critic and biographer. He was the brother of critic and teacher Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren. He won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Benjamin Franklin.
Go to Profile#8167
Neville Cardus
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus, CBE was an English writer and critic. From an impoverished home background, and mainly self-educated, he became The Manchester Guardians cricket correspondent in 1919 and its chief music critic in 1927, holding the two posts simultaneously until 1940. His contributions to these two distinct fields in the years before the Second World War established his reputation as one of the foremost critics of his generation.
Go to Profile#8168
Eduard Mörike
1804 - 1875 (71 years)
Eduard Friedrich Mörike was a German Lutheran pastor who was also a Romantic poet and writer of novellas and novels. Many of his poems were set to music and became established folk songs, while others were used by composers Hugo Wolf and Ignaz Lachner in their symphonic works.
Go to Profile#8169
Gostan Zarian
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Constant, or Kostan Zarian was an Armenian writer who produced short lyric poems, long narrative poems of an epic cast, manifestos, essays, travel impressions, criticism, and fiction. The genre in which he excelled, however, was the diary form with long autobiographical divagations, reminiscences and impressions of people and places, interspersed with literary, philosophical and historical meditations and polemics.
Go to Profile#8170
Léonide Massine
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin , better known in the West by the French transliteration as Léonide Massine , was a Russian choreographer and ballet dancer. Massine created the world's first symphonic ballet, Les Présages, and many others in the same vein. Besides his "symphonic ballets," Massine choreographed many other popular works during his long career, some of which were serious and dramatic, and others lighthearted and romantic. He created some of his most famous roles in his own comic works, among them the Can-Can Dancer in La Boutique fantasque , the Hussar in Le Beau Danube , and, perhaps best known of all, the Peruvian in Gaîté Parisienne .
Go to Profile#8171
Carles Riba
1893 - 1959 (66 years)
Carles Riba i Bracons was a Catalan poet, writer and translator of Spanish nationality. He was born in Barcelona and studied Law and Philosophy at the Universitat de Barcelona. In 1916 he married the poet Clementina Arderiu. He worked for a time in the School of Librarianship.
Go to Profile#8172
Martti Haavio
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Martti Henrikki Haavio was a Finnish poet, folklorist and mythologist, writing poetry under the pen name P. Mustapää. He was born on 22 January 1899 in Temmes, and died on 4 February 1973 in Helsinki. He was also a professor of folklore and an influential researcher of Finnish mythology. In 1960, Haavio married Aale Tynni, after his first wife Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio died in 1951 of cancer. His daughter, Elina Haavio-Mannila, is a social scientist. During Haavio's early career, he was a member of the Tulenkantajat literature club.
Go to Profile#8173
Fredrik Cygnaeus
1807 - 1881 (74 years)
Fredrik Cygnaeus was a Finnish poet, art critic and collector, docent of history and university professor of aesthetics and literature. Cygnaeus was an influential figure in Finnish art and literature, contributed to Finnish nationalism and was a central person in the Fennoman movement .
Go to Profile#8174
Thomas Hood
1799 - 1845 (46 years)
Thomas Hood was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, had lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson. Hood was the father of the playwright and humorist Tom Hood and the children's writer Frances Freeling Broderip .
Go to Profile#8175
Tekkan Yosano
1873 - 1935 (62 years)
Tekkan Yosano was the pen-name of Yosano Hiroshi, a Japanese author and poet active in late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa period Japan. His wife was fellow author Yosano Akiko. Cabinet minister and politician Kaoru Yosano is his grandson.
Go to Profile#8176
Sidney Howard
1891 - 1939 (48 years)
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
Go to Profile#8177
Gabriel Ferrater
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
Gabriel Ferrater i Soler was an author, translator and scholar of linguistics of the sixties who wrote in Catalan language. His poetical work is one of the most important among the authors of post-war Catalonia and he continues to exert a great deal of influence over authors nowadays. He published three collections of poems: Da nuces pueris , Menja't una cama and Teoria dels cossos , consequently compiled into a single volume called Les dones i els dies , which was a milestone in Catalan literature.
Go to Profile#8178
John Skelton
1460 - 1529 (69 years)
John Skelton, also known as John Shelton , possibly born in Diss, Norfolk, was an English poet and tutor to King Henry VIII of England. Skelton died in Westminster and was buried in St. Margaret's Church, although no trace of the tomb remains.
Go to Profile#8179
Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
Go to Profile#8180
Friedrich Gundolf
1880 - 1931 (51 years)
Friedrich Gundolf, born Friedrich Leopold Gundelfinger was a German-Jewish literary scholar and poet and one of the best known academics of the Weimar Republic. Early life and career Gundolf, who was the son of a mathematician, studied art history and German language and literature at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate in 1903 and completed his Habilitation eight years later. His habilitation work about "Shakespeare and the German spirit" , marked a turning point in German language and literature studies.
Go to Profile#8181
Friedebert Tuglas
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Friedebert Tuglas, born Friedebert Mihkelson or Michelson , was an Estonian writer and critic who introduced Impressionism and Symbolism to Estonian literature. Persecuted by the authorities in the beginning of 20th century, he later became an acknowledged representative of Estonian literature in the Soviet era.
Go to Profile#8182
Kazimierz Brodziński
1791 - 1835 (44 years)
Kazimierz Brodziński was an important Polish Romantic poet. Life He was born in Królówka near Bochnia. He came from the low nobility. He was a student at schools in Tarnów, where he also graduated from the grammar school. He served in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw. He took part in the campaign of 1812, during which he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. During the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Prussians. Having returned from captivity in 1814, he settled in Warsaw, where he worked as a clerk. He joined the freemasons, advanced to the fifth degree of initiation; in 1819 he became the secretary of the Great East.
Go to Profile#8183
Francis Thompson
1859 - 1907 (48 years)
Francis Joseph Thompson was an English poet and Catholic mystic. At the behest of his father, a doctor, he entered medical school at the age of 18, but at 26 left home to pursue his talent as a writer and poet. He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labour, becoming addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem.
Go to Profile#8184
Ouida
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Maria Louise Ramé , going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida , was an English novelist. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.
Go to Profile#8185
Hemachandra
1089 - 1172 (83 years)
Hemachandra was a 12th century Indian Jain saint, scholar, poet, mathematician, philosopher, yogi, grammarian, law theorist, historian, lexicographer, rhetorician, logician, and prosodist. Noted as a prodigy by his contemporaries, he gained the title kalikālasarvajña, "the knower of all knowledge in his times" and father of the Gujarati language.
Go to Profile#8186
Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
Go to Profile#8187
G. A. Henty
1832 - 1902 (70 years)
George Alfred Henty was an English novelist and war correspondent. He is most well-known for his works of adventure fiction and historical fiction, including The Dragon & The Raven , For The Temple , Under Drake's Flag and In Freedom's Cause .
Go to Profile#8188
Edward Dowden
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Edward Dowden was an Irish critic, professor, and poet. Biography He was the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant and landowner, and was born at Cork, three years after his brother John, who became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. Edward's literary tastes emerged early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve. His home education continued at Queen's College, Cork and at Trinity College, Dublin. He contributed to the literary magazine Kottabos.
Go to Profile#8189
John Livingston Lowes
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
John Livingston Lowes was an American scholar and critic of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer. Life John Livingston Lowes was born in Decatur, Indiana on December 20, 1867. He earned a B.A. from Washington and Jefferson College in 1888 and did postgraduate work in Germany and at Harvard University. He taught mathematics at Washington and Jefferson College until 1891 when he received his M.A.
Go to Profile#8190
Maurice Bloomfield
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Maurice Bloomfield, Ph.D., LL.D. was an Austrian Empire-born American philologist and Sanskrit scholar. Biography He was born Maurice Blumenfeld in Bielitz , in what was at that time Austrian Silesia to Jewish parents. His sister was Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and the linguist Leonard Bloomfield was his nephew. He married Rosa Zeisler in 1885, and had a son and a daughter; Rosa died in 1920. In 1921, he married Helen Scott.
Go to Profile#8191
Almeida Garrett
1799 - 1854 (55 years)
João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, 1st Viscount of Almeida Garrett was a Portuguese poet, orator, playwright, novelist, journalist, politician, and a peer of the realm. A major promoter of theater in Portugal he is considered the greatest figure of Portuguese Romanticism and a true revolutionary and humanist. He proposed the construction of the D. Maria II National Theatre and the creation of the Conservatory of Dramatic Art.
Go to Profile#8192
Polyaenus
101 - 200 (99 years)
Polyaenus or Polyenus was a 2nd-century CE Greek author, known best for his Stratagems in War , which has been preserved. He was born in Bithynia. The Suda calls him a rhetorician, and Polyaenus himself writes that he was accustomed to plead causes before the Roman emperor. Polyaenus dedicated Stratagems in War to the two emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus , while they were engaged in the Roman–Parthian War of 161–166, about 163, at which time he was too old to accompany them in their campaigns.
Go to Profile#8193
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve
1831 - 1924 (93 years)
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was an American classical scholar. An author of numerous works, and founding editor of the American Journal of Philology, he has been credited with contributions to the syntax of Greek and Latin, and the history of Greek literature.
Go to Profile#8194
Irving Stone
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Irving Stone was an American writer, chiefly known for his biographical novels of noted artists, politicians, and intellectuals. Among the best known are Lust for Life , about the life of Vincent van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy , about Michelangelo.
Go to Profile#8195
Thomas Holcroft
1745 - 1809 (64 years)
Thomas Holcroft was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator. He was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine to publish the first part of The Rights of Man.
Go to Profile#8196
Victor Eftimiu
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Victor Eftimiu was a Romanian poet and playwright. He was a contributor to Sburătorul, a Romanian literary magazine. His works have been performed in the State Jewish Theater of Romania. Eftimiu was of Albanian origin, but also had Aromanian descent through his father Gheorghe Eftimiu, a merchant. Eftimiu's mother was Maria Eftimiu, née Cociu. Victor Eftimiu was born in Boboshticë near Korçë. In 1905, he emigrated from Albania to Romania, where he found work as a theatre manager in 1913. He published several books of poetry, and wrote comedies and satirical pieces for the theatre. He also wrote a volume of Romanian fairy tales, and several children's books.
Go to Profile#8197
Otto Kern
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Otto Ferdinand Georg Kern was a German classical philologist, archaeologist and epigraphist. He specialized in the field of ancient Greek religion, being known for his investigations of Greek mystery cults and Orphism, as well as the ancient city of Magnesia on the Maeander and later also the history of ancient studies. In 1907 he became professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he became rector in 1915/16.
Go to Profile#8198
Robert Hillyer
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Robert Silliman Hillyer was an American poet and professor of English literature. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. Early life Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey to an old Connecticut family. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. After high school, he attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude in 1917. While there, he was the editor of the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was affiliated with the group known as the Harvard Aesthetes.
Go to Profile#8199
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
1848 - 1895 (47 years)
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was a Norwegian-American author and college professor. He is best remembered for his novel Gunnar: A Tale of Norse Life, which is generally considered to have been the first novel by a Norwegian immigrant in America.
Go to Profile#8200
Walther Kranz
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Walther Kranz was a German classical philologist and historian of philosophy. Biography Kranz studied classical philology at the University of Berlin from 1903 to 1907 with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Hermann Diels and Eduard Norden. He received his doctorate in 1910 with Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. For several years he was a teacher at the Berlin-Grunewald experimental school. In 1932, he joined the University of Halle as an honorary professor of classical languages . He took over the publication of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker from the 5th edition onwards. After the takeover by the Nazis, he experienced political difficulties because his wife was Jewish.
Go to Profile