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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8401
Guy Bolton
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Guy Reginald Bolton was an Anglo-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the US, he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the US, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby ...
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Oswald de Andrade
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Modern Art Week .
Go to Profile#8403
Maironis
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Maironis was a Lithuanian Roman Catholic priest and the greatest and most-known Lithuanian poet, especially of the period of the Lithuanian press ban. He was called the Bard of Lithuanian National Revival . Maironis was active in public life. However, the Lithuanian literary historian Juozas Brazaitis writes that Maironis was not.
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Pierre de Ronsard
1524 - 1585 (61 years)
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets". Ronsard was born at Manoir de la Possonnière in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, Vendômois. His father served Francis I as maître d'hôtel du roi. Ronsard received an education at home before attending the College of Navarre in Paris at age nine. He later travelled extensively, including visits to Scotland, Flanders, and Holland. After a hearing impairment halted his diplomatic career, Ronsard dedicated himself to study at the Collège Coqueret.
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François-René de Chateaubriand
1768 - 1848 (80 years)
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe , published posthumously in 1849–1850.
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Ferenc Molnár
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Ferenc Molnár , often anglicized as Franz Molnar, was a Hungarian-born author, stage director, dramatist, and poet, widely regarded as Hungary's most celebrated and controversial playwright. His primary aim through his writing was to entertain by transforming his personal experiences into literary works of art. He never connected to any one literary movement. However, he did utilize the precepts of naturalism, Neo-Romanticism, Expressionism, and Freudian psychoanalytic theories, but only as long as they suited his desires. "By fusing the realistic narrative and stage tradition of Hungary with ...
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Hayim Nahman Bialik
1873 - 1934 (61 years)
Hayim Nahman Bialik was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to a new spirit of his time, and recognized today as Israel's national poet. Being a noted essayist and story-teller, Bialik also translated major works from European languages.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Henrik Wergeland
1808 - 1845 (37 years)
Henrik Arnold Thaulow Wergeland was a Norwegian writer, most celebrated for his poetry but also a prolific playwright, polemicist, historian, and linguist. He is often described as a leading pioneer in the development of a distinctly Norwegian literary heritage and of modern Norwegian culture.
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Edgar Wallace
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure and sci-fi novels, plays and stories. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men . Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised shor...
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Valerius Maximus
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Valerius Maximus was a 1st-century Latin writer and author of a collection of historical anecdotes: . He worked during the reign of Tiberius . During the Middle Ages, Valerius Maximus was one of the most copied Latin prose authors, second only to Priscian. More than 600 medieval manuscripts of his books have survived as a result.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
1613 - 1680 (67 years)
François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac was an accomplished French moralist of the era of French Classical literature and author of Maximes and Memoirs, the only two works of his dense literary œuvre published. His Maximes portrays the callous nature of human conduct, with a cynical attitude towards putative virtue and avowals of affection, friendship, love, and loyalty. Leonard Tancock regards Maximes as "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature", with his "experience, his likes and dislikes, sufferings and petty spites ...
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Naomi Mitchison
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
Go to Profile#8414
Poliziano
1454 - 1494 (40 years)
Agnolo Ambrogini , commonly known as Angelo Poliziano or simply Poliziano, anglicized as Politian, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano .
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Gil Vicente
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Gil Vicente , called the Trobadour, was a Portuguese playwright and poet who acted in and directed his own plays. Considered the chief dramatist of Portugal he is sometimes called the "Portuguese Plautus," often referred to as the "Father of Portuguese drama" and as one of Western literature's greatest playwrights. Also noted as a lyric poet, Vicente worked in Spanish as much as he worked in Portuguese and is thus, with Juan del Encina, considered joint-father of Spanish drama.
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Frank O'Hara
1926 - 1966 (40 years)
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
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Molière
1622 - 1673 (51 years)
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin , known by his stage name Molière , was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the "language of Molière".
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Donald Barthelme
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction , and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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François Mauriac
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française , and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.
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Patrick Kavanagh
1904 - 1967 (63 years)
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.
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William Langland
1332 - 1386 (54 years)
William Langland is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman.
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Georg Wissowa
1859 - 1931 (72 years)
Georg Otto August Wissowa was a German classical philologist born in Neudorf, near Breslau. Education and career Wissowa studied classical philology under August Reifferscheid at the University of Breslau from 1876 to 1880, then furthered his studies in Munich under Heinrich Brunn, a leading authority on Roman antiquities. Having obtained his habilitation at the University of Breslau in 1882, he received a travel scholarship from the German Archaeological Institute and went to Italy for a year. After that he taught as Privatdozent in Breslau from 1883 to 1886, when he accepted a chair at the University of Marburg where he was awarded a full professorship in 1890.
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Ernst Robert Curtius
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Ernst Robert Curtius was a German literary scholar, philologist, and Romance languages literary critic, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
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Ioan Slavici
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Ioan Slavici was a Romanian writer and journalist from Austria-Hungary, later Romania. He made his debut in Convorbiri literare , with the comedy Fata de birău . Alongside Mihai Eminescu he founded the Young Romania Social and Literary Academic Society and organized, in 1871, the Putna Celebration of the Romanian Students from Romania and from abroad. At the end of 1874, he settled in Bucharest, where he became secretary of the Hurmuzachi Collection Committee, then he became a professor, and then an editor of the newspaper Timpul . Alongside Ion Luca Caragiale and George Coșbuc, he edited the Vatra magazine.
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Jørgen Moe
1813 - 1882 (69 years)
Jørgen Engebretsen Moe was a Norwegian folklorist, bishop, poet, and author. He is best known for the Norske Folkeeventyr, a collection of Norwegian folk tales which he edited in collaboration with Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. He also served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Kristianssand from 1874 until his death in 1882.
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Adam Oehlenschläger
1779 - 1850 (71 years)
Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger was a Danish poet and playwright. He introduced romanticism into Danish literature. He wrote the lyrics to the song Der er et yndigt land, which is one of the national anthems of Denmark.
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Qu Yuan
343 BC - 278 BC (65 years)
Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet and aristocrat in the State of Chu during the Warring States period. He is known for his patriotism and contributions to classical poetry and verses, especially through the poems of the Chu Ci anthology : a volume of poems attributed to or considered to be inspired by his verse writing. Together with the Shi Jing, the Chu Ci is one of the two greatest collections of ancient Chinese verse. He is also remembered in connection to the supposed origin of the Dragon Boat Festival.
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Franz Werfel
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh , a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette , a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
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Bruno Snell
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Bruno Snell was a German classical philologist. From 1931 to 1959 he held a chair for classical philology at the University of Hamburg where he established the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae research centre in 1944.
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Enid Blyton
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Enid Mary Blyton was an English children's writer, whose books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Her books are still enormously popular and have been translated into ninety languages. As of June 2019, Blyton held 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics, including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives. She is best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, the Five Find-Outers, and Malory Towers books, although she also wrote many others, including the St. ...
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Dorothy Wordsworth
1771 - 1855 (84 years)
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings.
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Moss Hart
1904 - 1961 (57 years)
Moss Hart was an American playwright, librettist, and theater director. Early years Hart was born in New York City, the son of Lillian and Barnett Hart, a cigar maker. He had a younger brother, Bernard. He grew up in relative poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and in Sea Gate, Brooklyn. He was the great-grandson of the Jewish bare-knuckle pugilist Barney Aaron.
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Sugawara no Michizane
845 - 903 (58 years)
Sugawara no Michizane was a scholar, poet, and politician of the Heian Period of Japan. He is regarded as an excellent poet, particularly in waka and kanshi poetry, and is today revered in Shinto as the god of learning, Tenman-Tenjin. In the poem anthology Hyakunin Isshu, he is known as Kanke, and in kabuki drama he is known as Kan Shōjō.
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Kostis Palamas
1859 - 1943 (84 years)
Kostis Palamas was a Greek poet who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn. He was a central figure of the Greek literary generation of the 1880s and one of the cofounders of the so-called New Athenian School along with Georgios Drosinis and Ioannis Polemis.
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Jan Kochanowski
1530 - 1584 (54 years)
Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who wrote in Latin and Polish and established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language. He has been called the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz and one of the most influential Slavic poets prior to the 19th century.
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Alexander Woollcott
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American drama critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
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Gottfried August Bürger
1747 - 1794 (47 years)
Gottfried August Bürger was a German poet. His ballads were very popular in Germany. His most noted ballad, Lenore, found an audience beyond readers of the German language in an English and Russian adaptation and a French translation.
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Robert W. Chambers
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Life Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton . His parents met when his mother was twelve years old and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually the two formed the law firm of Chambers and Boughton which continued to prosper even after Joseph's death in 1861. Robert Chambers's great-grandfather, ...
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Carlos Drummond de Andrade
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a Brazilian poet and writer, considered by some as the greatest Brazilian poet of all time. He has become something of a national cultural symbol in Brazil, where his widely influential poem "Canção Amiga" has been featured on the 50-cruzado novo bill.
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Frank O'Connor
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Frank O'Connor was an Irish author and translator. He wrote poetry , dramatic works, memoirs, journalistic columns and features on aspects of Irish culture and history, criticism, long and short fiction , biography, and travel books. He is most widely known for his more than 150 short stories and for his memoirs. The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award was named in his honour.
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Fyodor Tyutchev
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev was a Russian poet and diplomat. Life Tyutchev was born into a Russian noble family in the Ovstug family estate near Bryansk . His father Ivan Nikolaevich Tyutchev was a court councillor who served in the Kremlin Expedition that managed all building and restoration works of Moscow palaces. One of Ivan's sister , was a hegumenia famous for founding the Borisoglebsky Anosin Women's Monastery. The Tyutchevs traced their roots to Zakhariy Tutchev mentioned in The Tale of the Rout of Mamai, a 15th-century epic tale about the Battle of Kulikovo that described him as the ...
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Alfred Jarry
1873 - 1907 (34 years)
Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi , often cited as a forerunner of Dada and the Surrealist and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
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John Gower
1330 - 1408 (78 years)
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
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Aphra Behn
1640 - 1689 (49 years)
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea.
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Susan Glaspell
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
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Jami
1414 - 1492 (78 years)
Nūr ad-Dīn 'Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī , also known as Mawlanā Nūr al-Dīn 'Abd al-Rahmān or Abd-Al-Rahmān Nur-Al-Din Muhammad Dashti, or simply as Jami or Djāmī and in Turkey as Molla Cami, was a Sunni poet who is known for his achievements as a prolific scholar and writer of mystical Sufi literature. He was primarily a prominent poet-theologian of the school of Ibn Arabi and a Khwājagānī Sũfī, recognized for his eloquence and for his analysis of the metaphysics of mercy. His most famous poetic works are Haft Awrang, Tuhfat al-Ahrar, Layla wa Majnun, Fatihat al-Shabab, Lawa'ih, Al-Durrah al-Fakhirah. ...
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Agathias
536 - 582 (46 years)
Agathias Scholasticus was a Greek poet and the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558. Biography Agathias was a native of Myrina , an Aeolian city in western Asia Minor. His father was Memnonius. His mother was presumably Pericleia. A brother of Agathias is mentioned in primary sources, but his name has not survived. Their probable sister Eugenia is known by name. The Suda clarifies that Agathias was active in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I, mentioning him as a contemporary of Paul the Silentiary, Macedonius of Thessalonica an...
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Edmond Rostand
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques , was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.
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Christian Gottlob Heyne
1729 - 1812 (83 years)
Christian Gottlob Heyne was a German classical scholar and archaeologist as well as long-time director of the Göttingen State and University Library. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Maurice Leblanc
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.
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