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
Joe Orton
1933 - 1967 (34 years)
John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
Go to Profile#8252
DuBose Heyward
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Edwin DuBose Heyward was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.
Go to Profile#8253
Tom Taylor
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Tom Taylor was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.
Go to Profile#8254
Luo Guanzhong
1334 - 1400 (66 years)
Luo Ben , better known by his courtesy name Guanzhong , was a Chinese writer who lived during the Ming dynasty. He is also known by his pseudonym Huhai Sanren . Luo Guanzhong is credited with writing Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
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José Hernández
1834 - 1886 (52 years)
José Hernández was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierro. Biography Hernández, whose ancestry was Spanish, was born on a farm near San Martín . His father was a majordomo or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation.
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Rafael Obligado
1851 - 1920 (69 years)
Rafael Obligado was an Argentine poet and playwright. Obligado was the son of María Jacinta Ortiz Urién and Luis Obligado y Saavedra. During the 1880s, he became known as el poeta del Paraná . He wrote poetry with gaucho themes, but using cultured and educated language. He was heavily influenced by contemporary French poetry, and became well known in Argentina for his poem Santos Vega, an ode to a gaucho-troubadour, a type of composer and performer known in Argentina under the name of payador.
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Sholem Asch
1880 - 1957 (77 years)
Sholem Asch , also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. Life and work Asch was born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Congress Poland to Moszek Asz , a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska . Frajda was Moszek's second wife; his first wife Rude Shmit died in 1873, leaving him with either six or seven children . Sholem was the fourth of the ten children that Moszek and Frajda Malka had together. Moszek would spend all week on the road and return home every Friday in time for the Sabbath. He w...
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George Lyman Kittredge
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
George Lyman Kittredge was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England and New England.
Go to Profile#8259
Kafū Nagai
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Kafū Nagai was a Japanese writer, editor and translator. His works like Geisha in Rivalry and A Strange Tale from East of the River are noted for their depictions of life of the demimonde in early 20th-century Tokyo.
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Albert Verwey
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Albert Verwey was a Dutch poet belonging to the "Movement of Eighty". As a translator, staffer, and literary historian he played an important role in the literary life of The Netherlands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Joseph Bédier
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Joseph Bédier was a French writer and historian of medieval France. Biography Bédier was born in Paris, France, to Adolphe Bédier, a lawyer of Breton origin, and spent his childhood in Réunion. He was a professor of medieval French literature at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland and the Collège de France, Paris .
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William Goyen
1915 - 1983 (68 years)
Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.
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Francisco Urondo
1930 - 1976 (46 years)
Francisco "Paco" Urondo was an Argentine writer and member of the Montoneros guerrilla organization. Urondo published multiple collections of poetry, short stories, theatrical works, and a novel, as well as La patria fusilada, his famous interview with the survivors of the massacre at Trelew, and his critical essay Veinte años de poesía argentina. He also collaborated in the writing of movie scripts such as Pajarito Gómez and Noche terrible, and adapted for television Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and Eça de Queiroz's Os Maias.
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Mihail Sebastian
1907 - 1945 (38 years)
Mihail Sebastian was a Romanian playwright, essayist, journalist and novelist. Life Sebastian was born to a Jewish family in Brăila, the son of Mendel and Clara Hechter. After completing his secondary education, Sebastian studied law in Bucharest, but was soon attracted to the literary life and the exciting ideas of the new generation of Romanian intellectuals, as epitomized by the literary group Criterion which included Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Eugène Ionesco. Sebastian published several novels, including Accidentul and Orașul cu salcâmi , heavily influenced by French novelists such a...
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Johannes Aavik
1880 - 1973 (93 years)
Johannes Aavik was an Estonian philologist and Fennophile who played an influential role in the modernization and development of the Estonian language. Education and career Aavik studied history at the University of Tartu and the University of Nezin in 1905. He was a member of the Young Estonia movement and obtained a Doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Helsinki in 1910. Aavik taught Estonian and French at Tartu University between 1926 and 1933. In 1934 he was appointed by the Estonian Ministry of Education as Chief Inspector of Secondary Schools, a position he held until 1940.
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Shōhei Ōoka
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Shōhei Ōoka was a Japanese novelist, literary critic, and lecturer and translator of French literature who was active during the Shōwa period of Japan. Ōoka belongs to the group of postwar writers whose World War II experiences at home and abroad figure prominently in their works. Over his lifetime, he contributed short stories and critical essays to almost every literary magazine in Japan.
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Karel Sabina
1813 - 1877 (64 years)
Karel Sabina was a Czech writer and journalist. Life Karel Sabina grew up in poverty as an extramarital child of a daughter of a sugar producing factory's director in the family of a bricklayer and a washerwoman. Sabina later claimed that he was an illegitimate son of a Polish noble. Studied philosophy and law, but did not graduate. In 1848 Sabina became one of the leaders of the Czech radical democrats, the founder of a secret radical political circle "Repeal" , a member of the National Committee and the Czech congress. Sabina published many articles to magazines during this period.
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Emir Rodríguez Monegal
1921 - 1985 (64 years)
Emir Rodríguez Monegal , born in Uruguay, was a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal .
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Charles Péguy
1873 - 1914 (41 years)
Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.
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John Vanbrugh
1664 - 1726 (62 years)
Sir John Vanbrugh was an English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife , which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy. He was knighted in 1714.
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Manly Wade Wellman
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer. While his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown and Strange Stories, Wellman is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to the legendary Weird Tales and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as "the dean of fantasy writers." Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, detective fiction, western fiction, juveni...
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Damon Runyon
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Alfred Damon Runyon was an American journalist and short-story writer. He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from Brooklyn or Midtown Manhattan. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character and the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicts.
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Mizuho Ōta
1876 - 1955 (79 years)
Mizuho Ōta was the pen-name of Teiichi Ōta, a Japanese poet and scholar of Japanese literature, active in Shōwa period Japan. He also occasionally used another pen name, Mizuhonoya. Early life Ōta was born in Chikuma District, Nagano prefecture in what is now part of the city of Shiojiri. While still a student at Nagano Normal School , he taught himself the basics of traditional Japanese poetry by studying the ancient Japanese literature classics such as the Man'yōshū and Kokinshū, When he began writing his own poetry, he was able to get it published in the prestigious literary journal, Bungak...
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Tōson Shimazaki
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Tōson Shimazaki was the pen-name of Haruki Shimazaki, a Japanese writer active in the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He began his career as a Romantic poet, but went on to establish himself as a major proponent of Japanese Naturalism.
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Clifford D. Simak
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.
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August Immanuel Bekker
1785 - 1871 (86 years)
August Immanuel Bekker was a German philologist and critic. Biography Born in Berlin, Bekker completed his classical education at the University of Halle under Friedrich August Wolf, who considered him as his most promising pupil. In 1810 he was appointed professor of philosophy in the University of Berlin. For several years, between 1810 and 1821, he travelled in France, Italy, England and parts of Germany, examining classical manuscripts and gathering materials for his great editorial labours.
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Hovhannes Tumanyan
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Hovhannes Tumanyan was an Armenian poet, writer, translator, and literary and public activist. He is the national poet of Armenia. Tumanyan wrote poems, quatrains, ballads, novels, fables, and critical and journalistic articles. His works were mostly written in the style of realism, frequently revolving around the everyday life of his time. Born in the historical village of Dsegh in the Lori region, at a young age Tumanyan moved to Tiflis, which was the centre of Armenian culture under the Russian Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He soon became known to the wide Armenian socie...
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Aleksis Kivi
1834 - 1872 (38 years)
Aleksis Kivi was a Finnish author who wrote the first significant novel in the Finnish language, Seitsemän veljestä in 1870. He is also known for his 1864 play Heath Cobblers. Although Kivi was among the very earliest authors of prose and lyrics in Finnish, he is still considered one of the greatest.
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Kunio Kishida
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Kunio Kishida was a Japanese playwright, dramatist, novelist, lecturer, acting coach, theatre critic, translator, and proponent of Shingeki . Kishida spearheaded the modernization of Japanese dramaturgy and transformed Japanese theatre acting. He was a staunch advocate for the theatre to operate as a dual artistic and literary space.
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Hans Ferdinand Massmann
1797 - 1874 (77 years)
Hans Ferdinand Massmann was a German philologist, known for his studies in Old German language and literature, and for his work introducing gymnastics into schools in Prussia. Biography Massmann was born in Berlin, Margraviate of Brandenburg, where he also studied. He served in the War of Liberation, was a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, and was present at the Wartburg festival of 1817, where he participated in the book burning. In Berlin, he had been a friend and a pupil of Jahn. His radical ideas and "demagogue" sympathies brought him into difficulties with the authorities.
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William Ellery Channing
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
William Ellery Channing II was an American Transcendentalist poet, nephew and namesake of the Unitarian preacher Dr. William Ellery Channing. His uncle was usually known as "Dr. Channing", while the nephew was commonly called "Ellery Channing", in print. The younger Ellery Channing was thought brilliant but undisciplined by many of his contemporaries. Amos Bronson Alcott famously said of him in 1871, "Whim, thy name is Channing." Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists thought his poetry among the best of their group's literary products.
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George Ade
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
George Ade was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, and playwright who gained national notoriety at the turn of the 20th century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town", a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog.
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Thomas Campbell
1777 - 1844 (67 years)
Thomas Campbell was a Scottish poet. He was a founder and the first President of the Clarence Club and a co-founder of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland; he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what became University College London. In 1799 he wrote Pleasures of Hope, a traditional 18th-century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several patriotic war songs— "Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and, in 1801, The Battle of the Baltic, but was no less at home in delicate lyrics such as "At Love's Beginning".
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Balys Sruoga
1896 - 1947 (51 years)
Balys Sruoga was a Lithuanian poet, playwright, critic, and literary theorist. Early life He contributed to cultural journals from his early youth. His works were published by the liberal wing of the Lithuanian cultural movement, and also in various Lithuanian newspapers and other outlets . In 1914, he began studying literature in Saint Petersburg, and later in Moscow, due to World War I and the Russian Revolution. In 1921, he enrolled in the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where in 1924 he received his Ph.D for a doctoral thesis on Lithuanian folklore.
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Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
1826 - 1889 (63 years)
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin , born Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov and known during his lifetime by the pen name Nikolai Shchedrin , was a major Russian writer and satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of a Russian literary magazine Otechestvenniye Zapiski until the Tsarist government banned it in 1884. In his works Saltykov mastered both stark realism and satirical grotesque merged with fantasy. His most famous works, the family chronicle novel The Golovl...
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Eleanor Farjeon
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Eleanor Farjeon was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire. Several of her works had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Some of her correspondence has also been published. She won many literary awards and the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature is presented annually in her memory by the Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers. She was the sister of thriller writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
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Jean Toomer
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane , which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a Negro writer, as he identified as "American".
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Francis Beaumont
1584 - 1616 (32 years)
Francis Beaumont was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher. Beaumont's life Beaumont was the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace Dieu, near Thringstone in Leicestershire, a justice of the common pleas. His mother was Anne, the daughter of Sir George Pierrepont , of Holme Pierrepont, and his wife Winnifred Twaits. Beaumont was born at the family seat and was educated at Broadgates Hall at age thirteen. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and followed in his father's footsteps by enterin...
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Giuseppe Antonio Borgese
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Giuseppe Antonio Borgese was an Italian writer, journalist, literary critic, Germanist, poet, playwright and academic naturalized American. Biography Borgese was born in Polizzi Generosa, near Palermo . During the academic year 1899-1900, under pressure from his father who wanted him a lawyer, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law of the University of Palermo. In 1900 he moved to Florence where, at the Institute of Higher Studies, he follows the courses of Girolamo Vitelli, Pio Rajna, Pasquale Villari, Achille Coen and Guido Mazzoni. He graduated in literature at the University of Florence in 1903.
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Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
1622 - 1676 (54 years)
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen was a German author. He is best known for his 1669 picaresque novel Simplicius Simplicissimus and the accompanying Simplician Scriptures series. Early life Grimmelshausen was born at Gelnhausen. At the age of ten, he was kidnapped by Hessian soldiers, and in their midst experienced military life in the Thirty Years' War. In 1639, he became a regular soldier in the Imperial Army. At the latest, in the year 1644 he worked as a writer in a regiment's chancellery—from that year on documents by Hans Jakob Christoffel exist. At the close of the war, Grimmelshausen entered the service of Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, bishop of Strasbourg.
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Jean Froissart
1337 - 1405 (68 years)
Jean Froissart was a French-speaking medieval author and court historian from the Low Countries who wrote several works, including Chronicles and Meliador, a long Arthurian romance, and a large body of poetry, both short lyrical forms as well as longer narrative poems. For centuries, Froissart's Chronicles have been recognised as the chief expression of the chivalric revival of the 14th-century kingdoms of England, France and Scotland. His history is also an important source for the first half of the Hundred Years' War.
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Tamiki Hara
1905 - 1951 (46 years)
Tamiki Hara was a Japanese writer and survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, known for his works in the atomic bomb literature genre. Biography Hara was born in Hiroshima in 1905. In his early years, he was an introverted personality who suffered from anxiety states. While he was a middle school student, Hara became familiar with Russian literature, and also began to write poetry. He particularly admired the poets Murō Saisei and Paul Verlaine. After graduating from the English literature department of Keio University, he published prose and poetry works in Mita Bungaku magazine. In 1933, he married Sadae Sasaki, sister of literary critic Kiichi Sasaki.
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John Smith
1580 - 1631 (51 years)
John Smith was an English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, admiral of New England, and author. He played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in the early 17th century. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between September 1608 and August 1609, and he led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area. Later, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services...
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Otto Jahn
1813 - 1869 (56 years)
Otto Jahn , was a German archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music. Biography After the completion of his university studies at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, the University of Leipzig and Humboldt University, Berlin, he traveled for three years in France and Italy. In Rome, he was greatly influenced by the work of August Emil Braun . In 1839 he became privatdozent at Kiel, and in 1842 professor-extraordinary of archaeology and philology at the University of Greifswald .
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Ernest Dowson
1867 - 1900 (33 years)
Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer who is often associated with the Decadent movement. Biography Ernest Dowson was born in Lee, then in Kent, in 1867. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, a Prime Minister of New Zealand. Dowson attended The Queen's College, Oxford, but left in March 1888 without obtaining a degree.
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James Freeman Clarke
1810 - 1888 (78 years)
James Freeman Clarke was an American minister, theologian and author. Biography Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on April 4, 1810, James Freeman Clarke was the son of Samuel Clarke and Rebecca Parker Hull, though he was raised by his grandfather James Freeman, minister at King's Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended the Boston Latin School, and later graduated from Harvard College in 1829, and Harvard Divinity School in 1833.
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James Oliver Curwood
1878 - 1927 (49 years)
James Oliver Curwood was an American action-adventure writer and conservationist. His books were often based on adventures set in the Hudson Bay area, the Yukon or Alaska and ranked among the top-ten best sellers in the United States in the early and mid 1920s, according to Publishers Weekly. At least one hundred and eighty motion pictures have been based on or directly inspired by his novels and short stories; one was produced in three versions from 1919 to 1953. At the time of his death, Curwood was the highest paid author in the world.
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Catulle Mendès
1841 - 1909 (68 years)
Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters. Early life and career Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Mendès was born in Bordeaux. After childhood and adolescence in Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1859 and quickly became one of the protégés of the poet Théophile Gautier. He promptly attained notoriety with the publication in the La Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was allied with Parnassianism from the beginning of the movement and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume of poems, Philoméla .
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Johanna Spyri
1827 - 1901 (74 years)
Johanna Louise Spyri was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories. She wrote the popular book Heidi. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels.
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Åke Ohlmarks
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Åke Joel Ohlmarks was a Swedish author, translator and scholar of philology, linguistics and religious studies. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Greifswald from 1941 to 1945, where he founded the institute for religious studies together with the Deutsche Christen member . His most notable contribution to the field is his 1939 study of Shamanism. As a translator, he is notable for his Swedish version of the Icelandic Edda, of Shakespeare's works and a heavily criticised translation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as well as a version of the Qur'an and works by writers ...
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