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,
#8251
Tudor Vianu
1898 - 1964 (66 years)
Tudor Vianu was a Romanian literary critic, art critic, poet, philosopher, academic, and translator. He had a major role on the reception and development of Modernism in Romanian literature and art. He was married to Elena Vianu, herself a literary critic, and was the father of Ion Vianu, a psychiatrist, writer and essayist.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
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Miguel de Unamuno
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life , and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion , a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story.
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Rupert Brooke
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England". He died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite whilst aboard a French hospital ship moored off the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
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Friedrich Dürrenmatt
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten, a group of left-wing Swiss writers who convened regularly at a restaurant in the city of Olten.
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Harriet Monroe
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which she established in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.
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Saint-John Perse
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Alexis Leger , better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse , was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
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Christopher Smart
1722 - 1771 (49 years)
Christopher Smart was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.
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Hidemi Kon
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Hidemi Kon was a literary critic and essayist active in Japan during the Shōwa period. Early life Born in Hakodate, Hokkaidō, Kon Hidemi was the younger brother of writer, politician and Buddhist priest Kon Tōkō. His father was a captain of a steamer operated by Nippon Yusen, and the family relocated to Kobe from 1911. Kon moved to Tokyo in 1918, and was accepted into the French Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. His classmates included Hideo Kobayashi and Tatsuji Miyoshi, During this period, he became interested in drama, visiting the Tsukiji New Theater, and took part in sta...
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Nikolai Leskov
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms. His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , The Cathedral Folk , The Enchanted Wanderer , and "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea" .
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Karen Blixen
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author who wrote in Danish and English. She is also known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries, Tania Blixen, used in German-speaking countries, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.
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Prudentius
348 - 413 (65 years)
Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a Roman Christian poet, born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis in 348. He probably died in the Iberian Peninsula some time after 405, possibly around 413. The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta , Tarraco , or Calagurris .
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Donald Wandrei
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Donald Albert Wandrei was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the older brother of science fiction writer and artist Howard Wandrei. He had fourteen stories in Weird Tales, another sixteen in Astounding Stories, plus a few in other magazines including Esquire. Wandrei was the co-founder of the prestigious fantasy/horror publishing house Arkham House.
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Edward Johnston
1872 - 1944 (72 years)
Edward Johnston, CBE was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool. He is best known as the designer of Johnston, a sans-serif typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system until the 1980s. He also redesigned the famous roundel symbol used throughout the system.
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Robert Burns
1759 - 1796 (37 years)
Robert Burns , also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
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Robert W. Service
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of the gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he qu...
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Newton Arvin
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Fredrick Newton Arvin was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors. After teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for 38 years, he was forced into retirement in 1960 after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the possession of pictures of semi-nude males that the law deemed pornographic.
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Lucy Maud Montgomery
1874 - 1942 (68 years)
Lucy Maud Montgomery , published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a collection of novels, essays, short stories, and poetry beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. She published 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Anne of Green Gables was an immediate success; the title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Most of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island, and those locations within Canada's smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site – namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park.
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Noburu Katagami
1884 - 1928 (44 years)
Noburu Katagami was a Japanese literary critic and a professor of Russian literature at Waseda University. He is also known as Tengen Katagami . Biography Katagami was born in Imabari, Ehime and graduated Waseda University in 1906, majoring English literature. He supported naturalism as an editor of a journal Waseda bungaku. He became a professor at Waseda University in 1910, but later he became interested in Russian literature and traveled to Russia to study Russian literature . In 1920, when Waseda University created a department of Russian literature, Katagami was appointed as the chief pro...
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Vita Sackville-West
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH , usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer. Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.
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Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker
1784 - 1868 (84 years)
Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker was a German classical philologist and archaeologist. Biography Welcker was born at Grünberg, Hesse-Darmstadt. Having studied classical philology at the University of Giessen, in 1803 he was appointed master in the high school, an office which he combined with that of lecturer at the university. In 1806 he journeyed to Italy, and was for more than a year private tutor at Rome in the family of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who became his friend and correspondent.
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Hester Thrale
1741 - 1821 (80 years)
Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi , a Welsh-born diarist, author and patron of the arts, is an important source on Samuel Johnson and 18th-century English life. She belonged to the prominent Salusbury family, Anglo-Welsh landowners, and married first a wealthy brewer, Henry Thrale, then a music teacher, Gabriel Mario Piozzi. Her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson and her diary Thraliana, published posthumously in 1942, are the main works for which she is remembered. She also wrote a popular history book, a travel book, and a dictionary. She has been seen as a protofeminist.
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Giovanni Pascoli
1855 - 1912 (57 years)
Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the greatest Italian decadent poets.
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Viktor Rydberg
1828 - 1895 (67 years)
Abraham Viktor Rydberg was a Swedish writer and a member of the Swedish Academy, 1877–1895. "Primarily a classical idealist", Viktor Rydberg has been described as "Sweden's last Romantic" and by 1859 was "generally regarded in the first rank of Swedish novelists."
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James T. Farrell
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet. He is most remembered for the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979. Biography Farrell was born in Chicago, to a large Irish-American family which included siblings Earl, Joseph, Helen, John and Mary. In addition, there were several other siblings who died during childbirth, as well as one who died from the 1918 flu pandemic. His father was a teamster, and his mother a domestic servant. His parents were too poor to provide for him, and he went to live with his grandparents when he was three years old.
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Wang Guowei
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
Wang Guowei or Wang Kuo-wei, courtesy name Jing'an or Boyu , was a Chinese historian and poet. A versatile and original scholar, he made important contributions to the studies of ancient history, epigraphy, philology, vernacular literature and literary theory.
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Ivan Vazov
1850 - 1921 (71 years)
Ivan Minchov Vazov was a Bulgarian poet, novelist and playwright, often referred to as "the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature". He was born in Sopot, a town in the Rose Valley of Bulgaria . The works of Ivan Vazov reveal two historical epochs - the Bulgarian Renaissance and the Post-Liberation epoch. Ivan Vazov holds the highest honorary title of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Academician. He acted as Education and People Enlightenment Minister from September 7, 1897, until January 30, 1899, representing the People's Party.
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Mykola Zerov
1890 - 1937 (47 years)
Mykola Kostiantynovych Zerov was a Ukrainian poet, translator, classical and literary scholar and critic. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of the Executed Renaissance. Brief biography He studied philology at Saint Vladimir University in Kyiv. From 1917 to 1920, he edited the bibliographical journal. He was a professor of Ukrainian literature at the Kyiv Architectural Institute , the Kyiv Co-operative Tekhnikum , and the Kyiv Institute of People's Education . He also taught the theory of translation at the Ukrainian Institute of Linguistic Education .
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Salvator Rosa
1615 - 1673 (58 years)
Salvator Rosa is best known today as an Italian Baroque painter, whose romanticized landscapes and history paintings, often set in dark and untamed nature, exerted considerable influence from the 17th century into the early 19th century. In his lifetime he was among the most famous painters, known for his flamboyant personality, and regarded as an accomplished poet, satirist, actor, musician, and printmaker, as well. He was active in Naples, Rome, and Florence, where on occasion he was compelled to move between cities, as his caustic satire earned him enemies in the artistic and intellectual ...
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Klaus Mann
1906 - 1949 (43 years)
Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann was a German writer and dissident. He was the son of Thomas Mann, a nephew of Heinrich Mann and brother of Erika Mann and Golo Mann. He is well known for his 1936 novel, Mephisto.
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Julia Ward Howe
1819 - 1910 (91 years)
Julia Ward Howe was an American author and poet, known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.
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Saadat Hasan Manto
1912 - 1955 (43 years)
Saadat Hasan Manto was a Indo-Pakistani writer, playwright and author born in Ludhiana, who was active in British India and later, after the 1947 partition of India, in Pakistan. Writing mainly in Urdu, he produced 22 collections of short stories, a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of personal sketches. His best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. He is best known for his stories about the partition of India, which he opposed, immediately following independence in 1947. Manto's most notable work has been archived by R...
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Alexandru Macedonski
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
Alexandru Macedonski was a Romanian poet, novelist, dramatist and literary critic, known especially for having promoted French Symbolism in his native country, and for leading the Romanian Symbolist movement during its early decades. A forerunner of local modernist literature, he is the first local author to have used free verse, and claimed by some to have been the first in modern European literature. Within the framework of Romanian literature, Macedonski is seen by critics as second only to national poet Mihai Eminescu; as leader of a cosmopolitan and aestheticist trend formed around his L...
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John D. MacDonald
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
John Dann MacDonald was an American writer of novels and short stories. He is known for his thrillers. MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many set in his adopted home of Florida. One of the most successful American novelists of his time, MacDonald sold an estimated 70 million books. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series and his 1957 novel The Executioners, which was filmed as Cape Fear and remade in 1991.
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František Čelakovský
1799 - 1852 (53 years)
František Ladislav Čelakovský was a Czech poet, translator, linguist, and literary critic. He was a major figure in the Czech "national revival". His most notable works are Ohlas písní ruských and Ohlas písní českých .
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Giorgos Seferis
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Giorgos or George Seferis , the pen name of Georgios Seferiadis , was a Greek poet and diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.
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Carl Zuckmayer
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Carl Zuckmayer was a German writer and playwright. His older brother was the pedagogue, composer, conductor, and pianist Eduard Zuckmayer. His first two dramas were failures. In 1929, he wrote the script for the movie Der blaue Engel, for which he received the Georg Büchner Prize. He also wrote plays, including The Captain of Köpenick , Des Teufels General , Barbara Blomberg. Ein Stück in drei Akten , andKranichtanz. Ein Akt .
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Alfred de Vigny
1797 - 1863 (66 years)
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare. Biography Vigny was born in Loches to an aristocratic family. His father was a 60-year-old veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20th birthday; his mother, 20 years younger, was a strong-willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took personal responsibility for Vigny's early education. His maternal grandfather, the Marquis de Baraudin, had served as commodore with the royal navy.
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James Whitcomb Riley
1849 - 1916 (67 years)
James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author. During his lifetime he was known as the "Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and his children's poetry. His poems tend to be humorous or sentimental. Of the approximately 1,000 poems Riley wrote, the majority are in dialect. His famous works include "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Raggedy Man".
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Alfred Döblin
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Bruno Alfred Döblin was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz . A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politi...
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John Addington Symonds
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
John Addington Symonds Jr. was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although married with children, Symonds supported male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible . He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.
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Carlo Gozzi
1720 - 1806 (86 years)
Carlo, Count Gozzi was an Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell'arte. Early life Gozzi was born and died in Venice; he came from a family of minor Venetian aristocracy, the Tiepolos. At a young age, his parents were no longer able to support him financially, so he joined the army in Dalmatia. Three years later, he had returned to Venice and joined the Granelleschi Society. This society was dedicated to the pursuit of preservation of Tuscan literature from the influence of foreign culture; it was particularly interested in saving traditional Italian comedy such as Commedia dell'a...
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Robert Herrick
1591 - 1674 (83 years)
Robert Herrick was a 17th-century English lyric poet and Anglican cleric. He is best known for Hesperides, a book of poems. This includes the carpe diem poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", with the first line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may".
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Ingeborg Bachmann
1926 - 1973 (47 years)
Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet and author. She is regarded as one of the major voices of German-language literature in the 20th century. Early life and education Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of Olga and Matthias Bachmann, a schoolteacher. Her father was an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. She had a sister, Isolde, and a brother, Heinz.
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Granville Hicks
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist and, later, anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor. Early life Granville Hicks was born September 9, 1901, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Frank Stevens and Carrie Weston Hicks. He earned his A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University. In 1925 he married Dorothy Dyer, with whom he had a daughter, Stephanie.
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Benjamin Jowett
1817 - 1893 (76 years)
Benjamin Jowett was an English tutor and administrative reformer in the University of Oxford, a theologian, an Anglican cleric, and a translator of Plato and Thucydides. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
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William Wycherley
1640 - 1716 (76 years)
William Wycherley was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. Early life Wycherley was born at Clive near Shrewsbury, Shropshire, although his birthplace has been said to be Trench Farm to the north near Wem later the birthplace of another writer, John Ireland, who was said to have been adopted by Wycherley's widow following the death of Ireland's parents. He was baptised on 8 April 1641 at Whitchurch, Hampshire, son of Daniel Wycherley and his wife Bethia, daughter of William Shrimpton. His family was settled on a moder...
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Johan Ludvig Runeberg
1804 - 1877 (73 years)
Johan Ludvig Runeberg was a Finnish priest, lyric and epic poet. He wrote exclusively in Swedish. He is considered a national poet of Finland. He is the author of the lyrics to which became an unofficial Finnish national anthem. Runeberg was also involved in the modernization of the Finnish Lutheran hymnal and produced many texts for the new edition.
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Ferdinand Brunetière
1849 - 1906 (57 years)
Ferdinand Vincent-de-Paul Marie Brunetière was a French writer and critic. Personal and public life Early years Brunetière was born in Toulon, Var, Provence. After school at Marseille, he studied in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Desiring a teaching career, he entered for examination at the École Normale Supérieure, but failed, and the outbreak of war in 1870 prevented him trying again. He turned to private tuition and literary criticism. After the publication of successful articles in the Revue Bleue, he became connected with the Revue des Deux Mondes, first as contributor, then as secr...
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Naim Frashëri
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
Naim bey Frashëri, more commonly Naim Frashëri , was an Albanian historian, journalist, poet, rilindas and translator who was proclaimed as the national poet of Albania. He is regarded as a pioneer of modern Albanian literature and one of the most influential Albanian cultural icons of the 19th century.
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