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).
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8151
A. J. Cronin
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Archibald Joseph Cronin , known as A. J. Cronin, was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known novel is The Citadel , about a Scottish doctor who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London, where he becomes disillusioned about the venality and incompetence of some doctors. Cronin knew both areas, as a medical inspector of mines and as a doctor in Harley Street. The book exposed unfairness and malpractice in British medicine and helped to inspire the National Health Service.
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Zeami Motokiyo
1363 - 1443 (80 years)
, also called , was a Japanese aesthetician, actor, and playwright. His father, Kan'ami Kiyotsugu, introduced him to Noh theater performance at a young age, and found that he was a skilled actor. Kan'ami was also skilled in acting and formed a family theater ensemble. As it grew in popularity, Zeami had the opportunity to perform in front of the Shōgun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. The Shōgun was impressed by the young actor and began to compose a love affair with him. Zeami was introduced to Yoshimitsu's court and was provided with an education in classical literature and philosophy while continuing to act.
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Joyce Kilmer
1886 - 1918 (32 years)
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled "Trees" , which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his Catholic faith, Kilmer was also a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I, Kilmer was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc .
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Wang Anshi
1021 - 1086 (65 years)
Wang Anshi , courtesy name Jiefu , was a Chinese economist, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. He served as chancellor and attempted major and controversial socioeconomic reforms known as the New Policies. These reforms constituted the core concepts of the Song-dynasty Reformists, in contrast to their rivals, the Conservatives, led by the Chancellor Sima Guang.
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Milan Rešetar
1860 - 1942 (82 years)
Milan Rešetar was a linguist, historian and literary critic from Dubrovnik. Biography Rešetar was born in Dubrovnik. After the gymnasium in Dubrovnik, he studied classical philology and Slavic languages in Vienna and Graz. He worked as a high-school professor in Koper, Zadar and Split, and later a professor of Slavic studies on the universities of Vienna and Zagreb
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Denys Page
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Sir Denys Lionel Page was a British classicist and textual critic who served as the 34th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and the 35th Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for his critical editions of the Ancient Greek lyric poets and tragedians.
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Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Vincas Mykolaitis, known by his pen name Putinas ; 6 January 1893 – 7 June 1967 Biography In 1909, Mykolaitis enrolled to the Sejny Priest Seminary, after few years he published his first poem. In 1915, he was ordained as a priest, however he questioned his mission as a priest. Later he continued studies at the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy. In Saint Petersburg, Mykolaitis published his first collection of poems in 1917. After Saint Petersburg, Mykolaitis continued his studies at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and received doctoral degree in 1922.
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Alfred W. Pollard
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Alfred William Pollard, FBA was an English bibliographer, widely credited for bringing a higher level of scholarly rigor to the study of Shakespearean texts. Biography Pollard was born at 1 Brompton Square, Kensington in London, the youngest son of a doctor, Edward William Pollard. He was educated at King's College School in the Strand and St John's College at the University of Oxford. Unable to teach due to his pronounced stammer, he joined the staff of the British Museum in 1883, as assistant in the department of printed books; he was promoted to assistant keeper in 1909, and keeper in 1919.
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Johannes Aventinus
1477 - 1534 (57 years)
Johann Georg Turmair , known by the pen name Johannes Aventinus or Aventin, was a Bavarian Renaissance humanist historian and philologist. He authored the 1523 Annals of Bavaria, a valuable record of the early history of Germany.
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Friedrich Karl Theodor Zarncke
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Friedrich Karl Theodor Zarncke , German philologist, was born in Zahrensdorf, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the son of a country pastor. He was educated at the Rostock gymnasium, and studied at the universities of Rostock, Leipzig and Berlin. In 1848 he was employed in arranging the valuable library of Old German literature of Freiherr Karl Hartwig von Meusebach , and superintending its removal from Baumgartenbrück, near Potsdam, to the Royal Library at Berlin.
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Hermann Wilhelm Ebel
1820 - 1875 (55 years)
Hermann Wilhelm Ebel was a German philologist. Biography Ebel was born in Berlin. He displayed in his early years a remarkable capacity for the study of languages, and at the same time a passionate fondness for music and poetry.
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Takeo Arishima
1878 - 1923 (45 years)
was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist during the late Meiji and Taishō periods. His two younger brothers, and , were also authors. His son was the internationally known film and stage actor, Masayuki Mori.
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Arturo Graf
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
Arturo Graf , was an Italian poet and literary critic. Biography He was born in Athens, Greece, to a father born in Nuremberg, and a mother from Ancona. His father was a merchant, but with wide-ranging literary interests and fluent in multiple languages. As a boy the family moved to Trieste. Arturo, who spoke both Greek and Italian, traveled extensively through Italy during his youth. Circa 1855, after the death of his father, the family lived with his maternal uncle for a time in Braila, Rumania. There he learned Latin with private tutors. In time, he moved with his mother to Naples to further his studies.
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Jūji Tanabe
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Jūji Tanabe was a Japanese literature scholar, teacher, and mountain climber. Tanabe was born in Toyama City. He majored in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, specializing in William Wordsworth. He lectured at Toyo University and Hosei University.
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Fredric Brown
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Fredric Brown was an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. He is known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form—stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena", was adapted to a 1967 episode of the American television series Star Trek.
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Guillermo de Torre
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Guillermo de Torre Ballesteros was a Spanish essayist, poet and literary critic, a Dadaist and member of the Generation of '27. He is also notable as the brother-in-law of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
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James Shirley
1596 - 1666 (70 years)
James Shirley was an English dramatist. He belonged to the great period of English dramatic literature, but, in Charles Lamb's words, he "claims a place among the worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent genius in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common." His career of play writing extended from 1625 to the suppression of stage plays by Parliament in 1642.
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Arthur Surridge Hunt
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
Arthur Surridge Hunt, FBA was an English papyrologist. Hunt was born in Romford, Essex, England. Over the course of many years, Hunt, along with Bernard Grenfell, recovered many papyri from excavation sites in Egypt, including the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
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David Diop
1927 - 1960 (33 years)
David Mandessi Diop was a French West African poet known for his contribution to the Négritude literary movement. His work reflects his anti-colonial stance. Biography Diop was the son of Maria Mandessi Bell , a member of the Cameroonian Bell family, of which Rudolf Duala Manga Bell and Ndumbe Lobe Bell, both kings of the Duala people, were also members. He started writing poems while he was still in school, and his poems started appearing in Présence Africaine since he was just 15. Diop lived his life transitioning constantly between France and West Africa, from childhood onwards. While in Paris, Diop became a prominent figure in Négritude literature.
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William Mason
1724 - 1797 (73 years)
William Mason was an English poet, divine, amateur draughtsman, author, editor and gardener. Life He was born in Hull and educated at Hull Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge. He was ordained in 1754 and held a number of posts in the church.
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Hyakken Uchida
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Hyakken Uchida was a Japanese author and academic. Biography Uchida was born in Okayama to a family of sake brewers whose business later went bankrupt. His real name is Eizo Uchida . He became a pupil of Natsume Sōseki in 1911. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1914. He became professor of German at Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1916. He later taught at Hosei University . He is the main subject of Akira Kurosawa's last film, Madadayo. His novel, Disk of Sarasate is the inspiration for the film, Zigeunerweisen. He is the author of more than fifteen volumes of writings including I am a Cat: The Fake Version, and Gates Close at Dusk.
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Ben Travers
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Ben Travers was an English writer. His output includes more than 20 plays, 30 screenplays, 5 novels, and 3 volumes of memoirs. He is best remembered for his long-running series of farcess first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the Aldwych Theatre. Many of these were made into films and later television productions.
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Lillian Hellman
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belon...
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Alexandre Dumas fils
1824 - 1895 (71 years)
Alexandre Dumas was a French author and playwright, best known for the romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias , published in 1848, which was adapted into Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata , as well as numerous stage and film productions, usually titled Camille in English-language versions.
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Franz Rolf Schröder
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Franz Rolf Schröder , often referred to as F. R. Schröder, was a German philologist who was Professor and Chair of German Philology at the University of Würzburg. He specialized in the study German and early Germanic literature, and Germanic and Indo-European religion. He was for many decades editor of the .
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Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea...
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Anthony Boucher
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
William Anthony Parker White , better known by his pen name Anthony Boucher , was an American author, critic, and editor who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dramas. Between 1942 and 1947, he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to "Anthony Boucher", White also employed the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes", which was the pseudonym of a late-19th-century American serial killer; Boucher would also write light verse and sign it "Herman W. Mudgett" .
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Liu Yuxi
772 - 842 (70 years)
Liu Yuxi was a Chinese essayist, philosopher, and poet active during the Tang dynasty. Biography Family background and education His ancestors were Xiongnu nomadic people. The putative ‘seventh generation’ family head, Liu Liang, was an official of the Northern Wei , who followed the Emperor Xiaowen when he established the capital at Luoyang in 494. Following the government sinification policy, he became Han and register his surname as Liu. From then on the family was based in Luoyang.
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Fredrik Böök
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Martin Fredrik Böök was a Swedish professor of literary history at Lund University, literary critic and writer. He wrote biographies and books on Swedish literature. Biography Fredrik Böök became a philosophy graduate at Lund University in 1903, a philosophy licentiate and an associate professor of literary history in 1907 and a philosophy doctor in 1908. In 1920 he became professor of literary history at Lund University.
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Nevil Shute
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers or from fellow engineers that he was "not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.
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Francesco Redi
1626 - 1699 (73 years)
Francesco Redi was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist, and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology", and as the "father of modern parasitology". He was the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.
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John Drinkwater
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
John Drinkwater was an English poet and dramatist. He was known before World War I as one of the Dymock poets, and his poetry was included in all five volumes of Georgian Poetry . After World War I, he achieved fame as a playwright and became closely associated with Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
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Alcée Fortier
1856 - 1914 (58 years)
Alcée Fortier was a renowned Professor of Romance Languages at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the late 19th and early 20th century, he published numerous works on language, literature, Louisiana history and folklore, Louisiana Creole languages, and personal reminiscence. He had French Creole ancestry dating to the colonial period.
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Christian Karl Reisig
1792 - 1829 (37 years)
Christian Karl Reisig was a German philologist and linguist who was a native of Weißensee. Reisig studied philology under Gottfried Hermann at the University of Leipzig, afterwards furthering his studies at Göttingen . From 1813 to 1815 he was a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, afterwards working as a lecturer at the University of Jena. In 1820 he relocated to the University of Halle as an associate professor, where in 1824 he became a full professor. Two of his better known students were Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl and Friedrich Haase , the latter having published an edition of Reisig's Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft in 1839.
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Abraham Goldfaden
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Abraham Goldfaden , also known as Avram Goldfaden, was a Russian-born Jewish poet, playwright, stage director and actor in Yiddish and Hebrew languages and author of some 40 plays. Goldfaden is considered the father of modern Jewish theatre.
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Ton Satomi
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
is the pen-name of Japanese author Hideo Yamanouchi. Satomi was known for the craftsmanship of his dialogue and command of the Japanese language. His two elder brothers, Ikuma Arishima and Takeo Arishima, were also authors.
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Joseph Ritson
1752 - 1803 (51 years)
Joseph Ritson was an English antiquary who is well known for editing the first scholarly collection of Robin Hood ballads . After a visit to France in 1791, he became a staunch supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution. He was also an influential vegetarianism activist. He is also known for his collections of English nursery rhymes, such as "Roses Are Red" and "Little Bo-Peep", in Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus, published in London by Joseph Johnson.
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Martin Schanz
1842 - 1914 (72 years)
Martin Schanz was a German classicist and Plato scholar. He was a Dozent and Professor at the University of Würzburg from 1867 to 1912, and is especially known for his history of Roman literature and his ground-breaking, critical edition of Plato's dialogues.
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John Home
1722 - 1808 (86 years)
Rev John Home was a Scottish minister, soldier and author. His play Douglas was a standard Scottish school text until the Second World War, but his work is now largely neglected. In 1783, he was one of the joint founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Theodore Prodromos
1115 - 1160 (45 years)
Theodore Prodromos or Prodromus , probably also the same person as the so-called Ptochoprodromos , was a Byzantine Greek writer, well known for his prose and poetry. Biography Very little is known about his life. Further developing a genre begun by Nicholas Kallikles, he wrote many occasional poems for a widespread circle of patrons at the Byzantine court. Some of the literary pieces attributed to him are unpublished, while still others may be wrongly attributed to him. Even so, there does emerge from these writings the figure of an author in reduced circumstances, with a marked inclination to...
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William Rowley
1585 - 1626 (41 years)
William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626 in the graveyard of St James's, Clerkenwell in north London.
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Henry Arthur Jones
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Henry Arthur Jones was an English dramatist, who was first noted for his melodrama The Silver King , and went on to write prolifically, often appearing to mirror Ibsen from the opposite viewpoint. As a right-winger, he engaged in extensive debates with left-wing writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
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Charles Mackay
1814 - 1889 (75 years)
Charles Mackay was a Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter, remembered mainly for his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Early life Charles Mackay was born in Perth. His father, George Mackay, was a bombardier in the Royal Artillery, and his mother Amelia Cargill died shortly after his birth.
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Manuel Milà i Fontanals
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Manuel Milà i Fontanals was a Spanish scholar. He was born at Vilafranca del Penedès, near Barcelona, and was educated first in Barcelona, and afterwards at the University of Cervera. In 1845, he became professor of literature at the University of Barcelona, and held this post until his death at Vilafranca del Penedès on the July 16, 1884. The type of the scholarly recluse, Milà i Fontanals was almost unknown outside the walls of the university until 1859, when he was appointed president of the jocs florals at Barcelona.
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Ellen Glasgow
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim. A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
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Johannes Vahlen
1830 - 1911 (81 years)
Johannes Vahlen was a German classical philologist. He was the father of mathematician Theodor Vahlen . In 1852 he graduated at the University of Bonn, where he studied classical philology. In 1856 he became an associate professor at the University of Breslau, and in 1858 a full professor at the University of Freiburg. Shortly afterwards, he relocated to Vienna, and in 1862 became a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. From 1874 onward, he taught classes as a professor of classical philology at the University of Berlin. He was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
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Arsène Darmesteter
1846 - 1888 (42 years)
Arsène Darmesteter was a distinguished French philologist and man of letters. Biography He studied under Gaston Paris at the École pratique des hautes études, and became professor of Old French language and literature at the Sorbonne, where he met his wife, the painter Héléna Hartog. His Life of Words appeared in English in 1888. He also collaborated with Adolphe Hatzfeld in a Dictionnaire général de la langue française . Among his most important work was the elucidation of Old French by means of the many glosseses in the medieval writings of Rashi and other French Jews.
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Marc Monnier
1827 - 1885 (58 years)
Marc Monnier was a Swiss writer. Life Monnier was born at Florence. His father was French, and his mother a Genevese; he received his early education in Naples, he then studied in Paris and Geneva, and he completed his education at Heidelberg and Berlin. He became professor of comparative literature at Geneva, and eventually vice-rector of the university. He died at Geneva on April 18, 1885.
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Liviu Rebreanu
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Liviu Rebreanu was a Romanian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and journalist. Life Born in Felsőilosva , then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, he was the second of thirteen children born to Vasile Rebreanu, a schoolteacher, and Ludovica Diuganu, descendants of peasants. His father had been a classmate of George Coșbuc's and was an amateur folklorist. Liviu Rebreanu went to primary school in Major , where he was taught by his father, and then in Naszód and Beszterce , to military school at Sopron and then to the Ludovica Military Academy in Budapest. He worked as an ...
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Thomas Moore
1779 - 1852 (73 years)
Thomas Moore , also known as Tom Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
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