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,
#8451
Hermann Bonitz
1814 - 1888 (74 years)
Hermann Bonitz , German scholar, was born at Langensalza in Prussian Saxony. Having studied at the University of Leipzig under G. Hermann and at Berlin under Böckh and Lachmann, he became successively teacher at the Blochmann-Institut in Dresden , Oberlehrer at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium and the Graues Kloster in Berlin, professor at the gymnasium at Stettin , professor at the University of Vienna , member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences , member of the council of education , and director of the Graues-Kloster-Gymnasium . He retired in 1888, and died in that year at Berlin.
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Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg
1852 - 1937 (85 years)
Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg was an Argentine natural historian and novelist, one of the leading figures in Argentine biology. Together with Florentino Ameghino he undertook the inventory of Argentine flora and fauna, and explored all the ecoregions in the country, summarizing for the first time the biodiversity of its territory. The son of botanical aficionado and grandson of the Baron Holmberg, Holmburg accompanied Argentine Libertador Manuel Belgrano on his campaigns and introduced the cultivation of the camellia to Argentina. As director of the Buenos Aires Zoological Garden he greatly deve...
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Jan Gruter
1560 - 1627 (67 years)
Jan Gruter or Gruytère, Latinized as Janus Gruterus , was a Flemish-born philologist, scholar, and librarian. Life Jan Gruter was born in Antwerp. His father was Wouter Gruter, who was a merchant and city administrator of Antwerp, and his mother was Catharina Tishem from Norwich in England. To avoid religious persecution in the early stages of the Eighty Years' War, his parents emigrated to England while he was a child. For some years he studied at Caius College, Cambridge, after which he went to Leiden. In 1584 he obtained the degree of doctor iuris. He then left the Netherlands and com...
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H. J. C. Grierson
1866 - 1960 (94 years)
Sir Herbert John Clifford Grierson, FBA was a Scottish literary scholar, editor, and literary critic. Life and work He was born in Lerwick, Shetland, on 16 January 1866. He was the son of Andrew John Grierson and his wife, Alice Geraldine Grierson. In 1896 he married Mary Letitia Grierson, daughter of Sir Alexander Ogston, Professor of Surgery at Aberdeen. They had five daughters including Molly Dickins, author of A Wealth of Relations, about family history, writer Flora Grierson who co-founded the Samson Press, and writer and pianist Janet Teissier du Cros.
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John Moore
1729 - 1802 (73 years)
John Moore FRSE was a Scottish physician and travel author. He also edited the works of Tobias Smollett. Life He was born on 10 October 1729 in Stirling, the son of Rev Charles Moore of Rowallan and his wife, Marion Anderson. The family moved to Glasgow in his youth and he was educated at Glasgow Grammar School. He was then apprenticed to Dr. John Gordon in Glasgow 1745 to 1747.
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Josefina Niggli
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Josefina Niggli was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Cri...
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Francesco Alziator
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Francesco Alziator was an Italian writer and journalist. He was concerned for much of his career with the preservation of traditional Sardinian culture, mainly of is hometown Cagliari. Biography Alziator was born into an aristocratic and monarchical family on March 12, 1909. His father Mario was consul of Holland. He graduated in literature in 1932 and, two years later, in political science. In 1928 he published his first article, Prefices and funeral songs, on The Sardinian Union; in the same year he began to collaborate with the Mediterranean magazine. For years a convinced fascist, was part of the cultural organization G.U.F.
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Ferdinand Sommer
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Ferdinand Sommer was a German classical and Indo-European philologist. From 1893 he studied at the universities of Marburg and Freiberg, where he was a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen. In 1899 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Leipzig with the thesis Die Komparationssuffixe im Lateinischen . In 1902 he was named professor of Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and classical philology at the University of Basel, and later on in his career, he held professorships in Indo-European linguistics at the universities of Rostock , Jena and Bonn . From 1926 to 1951 he was a professor of c...
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Thomas Edward Brown
1830 - 1897 (67 years)
Thomas Edward Brown , commonly referred to as T. E. Brown, was a late-Victorian scholar, schoolmaster, poet, and theologian from the Isle of Man. Having achieved a double first at Christ Church, Oxford, and election as a fellow of Oriel in April 1854, Brown served first as headmaster of The Crypt School, Gloucester, then as a young master at the fledgling Clifton College, near Bristol
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John Payne
1842 - 1916 (74 years)
John Payne was an English poet and translator. Initially he pursued a legal career and had associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he became involved with limited edition publishing and the Villon Society.
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Ignaz Vincenz Zingerle
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
Ignaz Vincenz Zingerle was an Austrian poet and scholar. Zingerle was born, the son of the Roman Catholic theologian and orientalist Pius Zingerle , at Meran. He began his studies at Trento, and entered for a while the Benedictine monastery at Marienberg. Abandoning the clerical profession, he returned to Innsbruck, where, in 1848, he became teacher in the gymnasium, and in 1859 professor of German language and literature at the university. He died at Innsbruck in September 1892.
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Robert Fergusson
1750 - 1774 (24 years)
Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment. Many of his extant poems were printed from 1771 onwards in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, and a collected works was first published early in 1773. Despite a short life, his career was highly influential, especially through its impact on Robert Burns. He wrote both Scottish English and the Scots language, and it is his vivid and masterly ...
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Caroline Gordon
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was an American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and an O. Henry Award in 1934. Biography Gordon was born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky at her family's plantation home, "Woodstock". She was educated at her father's Clarksville Classical School for Boys in Montgomery County, Tennessee. In 1916, Gordon graduated from Bethany College and became a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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Émile Zola
1840 - 1902 (62 years)
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
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Abe Burrows
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Abe Burrows was an American humorist, author, and director for radio and the stage. He won a Tony Award and was selected for two Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was awarded. Early years Born Abram Solman Borowitz in New York City, Burrows graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and later attended both City College and New York University. He began working as a runner on Wall Street while at NYU, and he also worked in an accounting firm. After he met Frank Galen in 1938, the two wrote and sold jokes to an impressionist who appeared on Rudy Vallée's radio program.
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Klaus Groth
1819 - 1899 (80 years)
Klaus Groth was a Low German poet. Biography Groth was born in Heide, in Ditmarschen, the western part of the Duchy of Holstein. He was the oldest son of Hartwig Groth, a miller, and his wife Anna Christina. He spent an idyllic childhood in Heide, which served as inspiration for many of his later poetic works. After attending the local school, he studied at the teacher training college in Tondern from 1838 to 1841. Groth subsequently became a teacher at the girls’ school in his native village and devoted his spare time to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. He took an interesting in local traditions and played a part in several unique to Dithmarschen.
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Hermann Paul
1846 - 1921 (75 years)
Hermann Otto Theodor Paul was a German philologist, linguist and lexicographer. Biography He studied at Berlin and Leipzig, and in 1874 became professor of German language and literature in the University of Freiburg. In 1893 he was appointed professor of German philology at the University of Munich. He was a prominent Neogrammarian.
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Nasir Khusraw
1004 - 1088 (84 years)
Nasir Khusraw was a Isma'ili poet, philosopher, traveler, and missionary for the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate. Despite being one of the most prominent Isma'ili philosophers and theologians of the Fatimids and the writer of many philosophical works intended for only the inner circle of the Isma'ili community, Nasir is best known to the general public as a poet and writer who ardently supported his native Persian tongue as an artistic and scientific language. All of Nasir's philosophical Isma'ili works are in Persian, a rarity in the Isma'ili literature of the Fatimids, which primarily used Arab...
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August von Kotzebue
1761 - 1819 (58 years)
August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue was a German dramatist and writer who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany. In 1817, one of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften. This murder gave Metternich the pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, cracked down on the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom in the states of the German Confederation.
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Nancy Mitford
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Nancy Freeman-Mitford , known as Nancy Mitford, was an English novelist, biographer, and journalist. The eldest of the Mitford sisters, she was regarded as one of the "bright young things" on the London social scene in the inter-war period. She wrote several novels about upper-class life in England and France, and is considered a sharp and often provocative wit. She also has a reputation as a writer of popular historical biographies.
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Ned Washington
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Ned Washington was an American lyricist born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Life and career Washington was nominated for eleven Academy Awards from 1940 to 1962. He won the Best Original Song award twice: in 1940 for "When You Wish Upon a Star" in Pinocchio and in 1952 for "High Noon " in High Noon.
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Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
1694 - 1773 (79 years)
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a British statesman, diplomat, man of letters, and an acclaimed wit of his time. Early life He was born in London to Philip Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Chesterfield, and Lady Elizabeth Savile, and known by the courtesy title of Lord Stanhope until the death of his father in 1726. Following the death of his mother in 1708, Stanhope was raised mainly by his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax. Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he left just over a year into his studies, after focusing on languages and oration. He subsequently embarked on th...
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Anatole Broyard
1920 - 1990 (70 years)
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir , were published after his death.
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Romain Gary
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Romain Gary , born Roman Kacew , was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names. He is considered a major writer of French literature of the second half of the 20th century. He was married to Lesley Blanch, then Jean Seberg.
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José Gorostiza
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
José Gorostiza Alcalá was a Mexican poet, educator, and diplomat. For his achievements in the poetic arts, he was made a member of the . Biography José Gorostiza was born in the riverine city of Villahermosa, then known as San Juan Bautista, to Celestino Gorostiza and Elvira Alcalá de Gorostiza. He was a descendant of the Spanish playwright Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza. His younger brother Celestino would also become an important artist. He moved to Mexico City to attend the National Preparatory School and later the Colegio Francés de Mascarones. After graduating from the Universidad Nacional ...
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Francis Scott Key
1779 - 1843 (64 years)
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of the text of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner". Key observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 during the War of 1812. He was inspired upon seeing the American flag still flying over the fort at dawn and wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry"; it was published within a week with the suggested tune of the popular song "To Anacreon in Heaven". The song with Key's lyrics became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and slowly gained in popularit...
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Dafydd ap Gwilym
1320 - 1380 (60 years)
Dafydd ap Gwilym is regarded as one of the leading Welsh poets and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages. Life R. Geraint Gruffydd suggests 1315- 1350 as the poet's dates; others place him a little later from 1320-40 1370-80.
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Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
1565 - 1601 (36 years)
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, KG, PC was an English nobleman and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Politically ambitious, and a committed general, he was placed under house arrest following a poor campaign in Ireland during the Nine Years' War in 1599. In 1601, he led an abortive coup d'état against the government of Elizabeth I and was executed for treason.
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Philip Massinger
1583 - 1640 (57 years)
Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.
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Joachim du Bellay
1522 - 1560 (38 years)
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a founder of La Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin.
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Herbert Weir Smyth
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Herbert Weir Smyth was an American classical scholar. His comprehensive grammar of Ancient Greek has become a standard reference on the subject in English, comparable to that of William Watson Goodwin, whom he succeeded as Eliott Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University.
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Fannie Hurst
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst also actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
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Chen Hengzhe
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Chen Hengzhe , pen name Sophia H. Z. Chen , was a pioneering writer in modern vernacular Chinese literature, a leader in the New Culture Movement, and the first female professor at a Chinese university. Chen is known for aiming to educate Chinese people by incorporating values from both Western culture and Chinese culture, producing many works reflecting these values.
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Pietro Bembo
1470 - 1547 (77 years)
Pietro Bembo, was an Italian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance , Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a standard language, became the modern Italian language. In the 16th century, Bembo's poetry, essays and books proved basic to reviving interest in the literary works of Petrarch. In the field of music, Bembo's literary writing techniques ...
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Kamini Roy
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Kamini Roy was a Bengali poet, social worker and feminist in British India. She was the first woman honours graduate in British India. Early life Born on 12 October 1864 in the village of Basunda, then in Bakerganj District of Bengal Presidency and now in Jhalokati District of Bangladesh, Roy joined Bethune School in 1883. One of the first girls to attend school in British India, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Sanskrit honours from Bethune College of the University of Calcutta in 1886 and started teaching there in the same year. Kadambini Ganguly, the country's second female honour...
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Oscar Micheaux
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux Early life and education Micheaux was born on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, on January 2, 1884. He was the fifth child born to Calvin S. and Belle Michaux, who had a total of 13 children. In his later years, Micheaux added an "e" to his last name. His father was born a slave in Kentucky. Because of his surname, his father's family appears to have been enslaved by French-descended settlers. French Huguenot refugees had settled in Virginia in 1700; their descendants took slaves west when they migrated into Kentucky after the American Revolutionary War.
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Helen Gardner
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Dame Helen Louise Gardner, was an English literary critic and academic. Gardner began her teaching career at the University of Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1975 was a Merton Professor of English Literature, the first woman to have that position. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot, but also published on John Milton and William Shakespeare. She published over a dozen books, and received multiple honours.
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Atsushi Nakajima
1909 - 1942 (33 years)
Atsushi Nakajima was a Japanese author known for his unique style and self-introspective themes. His major works include "The Moon Over the Mountain" and "Light, Wind and Dreams" with the former being published in many Japanese textbooks.
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André Chénier
1762 - 1794 (32 years)
André Marie Chénier was a French poet of Greek and Franco-Levantine origin, associated with the events of the French Revolution of which he was a victim. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for supposed "crimes against the state", just three days before the end of the Reign of Terror. Chénier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and other works of art.
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Richard Livingstone
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Sir Richard Winn Livingstone was a British classical scholar, educationist, and academic administrator. He promoted the classical liberal arts. Life Livingstone was born on 23 January 1880 in Liverpool. His father was an Anglican vicar; his mother the daughter of an Irish baron. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He remained at the University of Oxford until 1924 as fellow, tutor, and librarian at Corpus Christi College. In 1920, he served on the Prime Minister's committee on the classics. During 1920–22, he was co-editor of the Classical Review.
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Andreas Heusler
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Andreas Heusler was a Swiss philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. He was a Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Berlin and a renowned authority on early Germanic literature.
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Mokichi Saitō
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Mokichi Saitō was a Japanese poet of the Taishō period, a member of the Araragi school of tanka, and a psychiatrist. Mokichi was born in the village of Kanakame, now part of Kaminoyama, Yamagata in 1882. He attended Tokyo Imperial University Medical School and, upon graduation in 1911, joined the staff of Sugamo Hospital where he began his study of psychiatry. He later directed Aoyama Hospital, a psychiatric facility.
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Ovid Densusianu
1873 - 1938 (65 years)
Ovid Densusianu was a Romanian poet, philologist, linguist, folklorist, literary historian and critic, chief of a poetry school, university professor and journalist. He is known for introducing new trends of European modernism into Romanian literature.
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Roger Ascham
1515 - 1568 (53 years)
Roger Ascham was an English scholar and didactic writer, famous for his prose style, his promotion of the vernacular, and his theories of education. He served in the administrations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, having earlier acted as Elizabeth's tutor in Greek and Latin between 1548 and 1550.
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Paul Green
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright whose work includes historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.
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George Ticknor
1791 - 1871 (80 years)
George Ticknor was an American academician and Hispanist, specializing in the subject areas of languages and literature. He is known for his scholarly work on the history and criticism of Spanish literature.
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George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham
1628 - 1687 (59 years)
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 20th Baron de Ros, was an English statesman and poet who exerted considerable political power during the reign of Charles II of England. A Royalist during the English Civil War, in 1651 he joined Charles II's court-in-exile in France. He returned to England in 1657 after a disagreement with the king, but subsequently supported the Stuart Restoration in 1660. Buckingham was imprisoned by Charles on several occasions before rising to be one of his most influential advisors, becoming a key member of the Cabal ministry in 1668. In 1674 he was dismissed an...
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Wu Cheng'en
1500 - 1582 (82 years)
Wu Cheng'en , courtesy name Ruzhong , was a Chinese novelist, poet, and politician during the Ming dynasty. He is considered by many to be the author of Journey to the West, one of the Classic Chinese Novels.
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Alfred Noyes
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Alfred Noyes CBE was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright. Early years Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Aberystwyth, Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek. The Welsh coast and mountains were an inspiration to Noyes.
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Arthur Wing Pinero
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright and, early in his career, actor. Pinero was drawn to the theatre from an early age, and became a professional actor at the age of 19. He gained experience as a supporting actor in British provincial theatres, and from 1876 to 1881 was a member of Henry Irving's company, based at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
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