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,
#8501
Cedric Whitman
1916 - 1979 (63 years)
Cedric Hubbell Whitman was an American poet and academic from Providence, Rhode Island. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1947 and joined the faculty that year. In 1966, he became the first Jones Professor of Classic Literature. In 1974, Whitman became the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, a position he would serve until his death in 1979.
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Michael Anesko
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michael Anesko is a U.S. literary critic, writer and professor. He is perhaps best known for his studies of 19th-century American novelists, in particular, Henry James and William Dean Howells. He is currently a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and previously served as faculty advisor for the department's undergraduate honors program. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and also in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Sir Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge, was a British classicist and one of the greatest authorities on the theatre of ancient Greece in the first half of the 20th century. Pickard-Cambridge was born in Bloxworth Rectory, the son of the Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge , a naturalist and entomologist.
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Thornton Wilder
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth– and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
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Brooks Otis
1908 - 1977 (69 years)
Brooks Otis was an American classicist. Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard in 1929, took the M.A. in 1930, and received the Ph.D. in 1935. Otis taught at Hobart College from 1935 to 1957, then at American University of Beirut for one year before accepting a position at Stanford University as Professor of Classics. In 1970 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he followed T. Robert S. Broughton as George L. Paddison Professor of Latin. While at Stanford Otis was one of the founders of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy, in 1965. ...
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Robert Guy Howarth
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
#8507
John Ciardi
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio.
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Arthur E. Gordon
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Arthur Ernest Gordon was an American classical philologist and epigraphist. Life and career Born in Marlborough, Vermont, Gordon studied classical philology at Dartmouth College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923. He continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1925 he became a lecturer in Latin at Dartmouth College and in 1928 at Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1929, where he worked with Tenney Frank, and afterwards briefly taught Latin and Ancient History at the University of Vermont. Gordon was invited to the University ...
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Joseph Wood Krutch
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Joseph Wood Krutch was an American author, critic, and naturalist who wrote nature books on the American Southwest. He is known for developing a pantheistic philosophy. Biography Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he was educated at the University of Tennessee and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. After serving in the army in 1918, he traveled in Europe for a year with his friend, Mark Van Doren. Following World War I, he taught English composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic.
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R. A. B. Mynors
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors was an English classicist and medievalist who held the senior chairs of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A textual critic, he was an expert in the study of manuscripts and their role in the reconstruction of classical texts.
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Gerald Wendt
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Gerald L. Wendt was a chemist who became a writer and lecturer on popular science. He was director of science and education at the New York World's Fair, an editor at Time magazine and Science Illustrated, and worked for UNESCO.
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Gilbert Seldes
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz . He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding...
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Charlton Laird
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Charlton Grant Laird was an American linguist, lexicographer, novelist, and essayist. Laird created the 1971 edition of the Webster's New World Thesaurus that became the standardized edition still used today. During his lifetime, he was probably best known for his language studies: books, textbooks, and reference works elucidating the English language for the layman along with his numerous contributions to dictionaries and thesauruses.
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Gertrude Smith
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.
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Hyatt Howe Waggoner
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Hyatt Howe Waggoner was a professor of English. He is today best known for his work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches , Hawthorne: A Critical Study and The Presence of Hawthorne , and in 1978 played a pivotal role in the authentication of the novelist's "lost notebook". In the year of Waggoner's death, he was honoured with the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award. He did not, however, confine his output to one author: "I've moved around the field", he declared, "at the risk of being superficial." Among the other literary figures who incurred his att...
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Louis Gernet
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Louis Gernet was a French philologist and sociologist. Life A student at the École Normale Supérieure , he received a licentiate in law and agrégation in grammar. In 1917, supported by the Fondation Thiers, he received his doctorate in letters with a dissertation entitled "Researches on the development of legal and moral thought in Greece".
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Otto Skutsch
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Otto Skutsch was a German-born British classicist and academic, specialising in classical philosophy. He was Professor of Latin at University College London from 1951 to 1972. Early life Skutsch was born on 6 December 1906 in Breslau, then in the German Empire. He was the third child of Franz Skutsch, a German classical philologist. He was six years old when his father died. He was educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Breslau. He then studied at the University of Breslau, the University of Kiel, the University of Berlin, and the University of Göttingen. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1934.
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Julio Jiménez Rueda
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...
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Dorothea Krook-Gilead
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.
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Newton Phelps Stallknecht
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Newton Phelps Stallknecht was an American philosopher and a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Indiana University. In addition, he was the Director of the School of Letters at Indiana University from 1953-1972. He also served as a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Stallknecht was educated at Princeton University, achieving his A.B. in 1927, A.M. in 1928, and Ph.D. in 1930. During World War II, he was attached to the United States Army Security Agency in Washington. His publications cover both philosophy and comparative literature, with a philosophical fo...
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Rosemary Woolf
1925 - 1978 (53 years)
Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...
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Hans Krahe
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
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Alexander Gray
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Sir Alexander Gray was a Scottish civil servant, economist, academic, translator, writer and poet. Life and work He was born at 1 Marshall Street in Lochee near Dundee the son of John Young Gray, an art teacher at the High School of Dundee, and his wife, Mary Young.
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Robert Kaske
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America. His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf, and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies. Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, "Th...
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Gianfranco Contini
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Gianfranco Contini was an Italian academic and philologist. He studied at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola, then at the University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1933. Later, he studied also in Turin, where he met Giulio Einaudi, Massimo Mila, and Leone Ginzburg, who shortly after started the Einaudi's publishing company. From 1934 to 1936, he lived in Paris, following Joseph Bédier's lessons, then he was called to teach in Florence and Pisa, where he became a contributor to "Letteratura", a literary magazine where he shared his views, among others, with Eugenio Montale, and where he began to collaborate with the Accademia della Crusca.
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Carroll Vincent Newsom
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Carroll Vincent Newsom was an American educator who served as the eleventh NYU president and president of Prentice Hall. Newsom was born February 23, 1904, in Buckley, Illinois. He received a B.A. from the College of Emporia in 1924, a M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1927 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1931.
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Clyde Pharr
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Clyde Pharr was an American classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, Southwestern Presbyterian University , Vanderbilt University , and, finally, at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life Pharr was born in Saltillo, Texas, the son of Samuel Milton Pharr and Josephine Fleming Pharr. He attended Saltillo High School and earned B.S. and A.B. degrees from East Texas Normal College in 1903 and 1905, respectively. He continued his education at Yale University, earning another A.B. there in 1906. He was named an Abernathy Fellow at Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1910. From 1...
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Donald Alfred Stauffer
1902 - 1952 (50 years)
Donald Alfred Stauffer was an American literary critic, novelist and Professor of English who spent the majority of his career at Princeton University. Biography Stauffer studied at Princeton University, where he completed his A.B. degree in 1923 and A.M. degree in 1924. He received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. degree in 1928. After completing his doctorate he returned to Princeton, where he spent most of his career as Professor of English and English Department Chairman.
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Walter Eugene Clark
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Walter Eugene Clark , was an American philologist. He was the second Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and editor of the volumes 38-44 of the Harvard Oriental Series. He translated the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata with critical notes which was published in 1930, by the University of Chicago Press.
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Horace Gregory
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Horace Gregory was a prize-winning American poet, translator of classic poetry, literary critic and college professor. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1965. Life A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in 1923, he was the author of eight books of poems. He translated poems by the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid, and wrote biographies of Whistler and Amy Lowell. In 1925, he married poet and editor Marya Zaturenska . They had two children: Patrick Bolten Gregory and Joanna Elizabeth Zeigler née Gregory.
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Frank Card Bourne
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Frank Card Bourne was an American classicist. Life He was born on 17 July 1914. His parents were Moses Avander and Grace Winchester. He died in 1983. Career He graduated from Princeton University with his bachelor's degree in 1936 and a PhD in 1941. He was the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature there from 1946 to 1976.
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Janko Lavrin
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Janko Lavrin was a Slovene novelist, poet, critic, translator, and historian. He was Professor Andrej Jelenc DiCaprio of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. An enthusiast for psycho-analysis, he wrote what he called 'psycho-critical studies' of Ibsen, Nietzsche and Tolstoy.
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Erich Kahler
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Erich von Kahler was a mid-twentieth-century European-American literary scholar, essayist, and teacher known for works such as The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Man . Kahler was born to a Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied philosophy, literature, history, art history, sociology, and psychology at the University of Munich, the University of Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Freiburg before earning his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1911. In 1912, he married his first wife, Josephine . In...
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Cornelia C. Coulter
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
Cornelia Catlin Coulter was an American classicist and academic who was Professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.
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Thomas G. Bergin
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Thomas Goddard Bergin was an American scholar of Italian literature, who was "noted particularly for his research on Dante's Divine Comedy and for its translation". He was the Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University, and Master of Timothy Dwight College. He is the first poet to have his words launched into outer space to orbit the Earth.
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F. B. Kaye
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Frederick Benjamin Kaye was an American scholar who was notable for his work on Bernard Mandeville. Early life and education Kaye was born in New York City as Frederick Benjamin Kugelman to Julius G. Kugelman, a native of Hamburg, Germany, who had emigrated to New York. Frederick Kugelman subsequently changed his surname to Kaye. He was educated at Yale University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1914 and a Master of Arts in 1916.
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Eduard Schwyzer
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Eduard Schwyzer was a Swiss Classical philologist and Indo-European linguist, specializing in Ancient Greek and Greek dialects. He was a professor in Zürich 1912–1926, in Bonn from 1927 and in Berlin from 1932. 1898–1927 and 1934–1943 he also worked for the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, first as an editor, later reading all correction sheets.
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Gustave Lanson
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Gustave Lanson was a French historian and literary critic. He taught at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. A dominant figure in French literary criticism, he influenced several generations of writers and critics through his teachings, which were anti-systematic and promoted a scrupulous and erudite approach to texts via extensive firsthand research, inventorying, and in-depth historical investigation.
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Georg Baesecke
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Georg Paul Baesecke was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies, particularly the study of Old High German literature. He was Professor and Chair of German Philology at the University of Halle.
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Joseph Bidez
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Joseph Marie Auguste Bidez was a Belgian classical philologist. He was Professor of Classical Philology and the History of Philosophy at the University of Ghent.
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George Norlin
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
George Norlin was president of the University of Colorado. During his tenure as president, Norlin oversaw the redesign of the campus in Boulder, Colorado. Early life and education Norlin was born in Concordia, in Cloud County, Kansas, the son of Gustaf Wilhelm Norlin and Valborg Fahnehielm Norlin , both Swedish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1869. He moved to Fish Creek, Wisconsin with his family in 1879. Norlin received his Bachelor of Arts in Greek from Hastings College in 1893. He worked as a Greek instructor there before studying at the University of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D.
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Cornelia Meigs
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Cornelia Lynde Meigs was an American writer of fiction and biography for children, teacher of English and writing, historian and critic of children's literature. She won the Newbery Medal for her 1933 biography of Louisa May Alcott, entitled Invincible Louisa. She also wrote three Newbery Honor Books.
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Otto Höfler
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Otto Eduard Gotfried Ernst Höfler was an Austrian philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. A student of Rudolf Much, Höfler was Professor and Chair of German Language and Old German Literature at the University of Vienna. Höfler was also a Nazi from 1922 and a member of the SS Ahnenerbe before the Second World War. Höfler was a close friend of Georges Dumézil and Stig Wikander, with whom he worked closely on developing studies on Indo-European society. He tutored a significant number of future prominent scholars at Vienna, and was the author of works on early Germanic culture. refers...
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Wayland Maxfield Parrish
1887 - Present (139 years)
Wayland Maxfield Parrish was an American professor and writer. Life and career Born in Mohawk, Ohio, in 1887, he is noted for writing a few books dealing with rhetoric titled Reading Aloud, Speaking in Public, American Speeches, The Teacher's Speech, and Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric: Parts I and II. His most well-known are Reading Aloud and American Speeches. He also wrote and contributed to various journal articles concerning speech and rhetoric. He graduated from Cornell's prestigious linguistics program, he went on to teach at the University of Pittsburgh and then the University ...
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John Wight Duff
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
John Wight Duff, FBA was a Scottish classicist and academic. He was Professor of Classics at Armstrong College, Durham from 1898 to 1933. Education Born in Dundee on 4 September 1866, Duff was the son of an iron founder, William Duff and his wife, Sarah Fergusson Wight. His grandfather was a well-known brass founder and Provost of Greenock, where the family had a connection with James Watt, the engineer. John attended Aberdeen Grammar School, winning gold medals each year he was at the school and leaving as Latin dux in 1882. He then read classics at the University of Aberdeen, graduating with first-class honours in 1886 and winning the Simpson Prize for best graduate in Ancient Greek.
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Claude Colleer Abbott
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Claude Colleer Abbott was an English poet, scholar and university lecturer, the 'C. C. Abbott' of academic publications. He is principally known as the editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins' correspondence.
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Louis Trimble
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Louis Preston Trimble was an American writer and academic. His published work included science fiction, westerns, mysteries, and academic non-fiction. He generally wrote as Louis Trimble, but used the pseudonym "Stuart Brock" for some of his work.
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Rudolf Schottlaender
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Rudolf Schottlaender was a German philosopher, classical philologist, translator and political publicist of Jewish descent. Biography Rudolf Schottlaender studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann in Freiburg im Breisgau. There, he became acquainted with Günther Stern and married Stern's sister Hilde shortly afterwards . Schottlaender also studied with Karl Jaspers. Despite his active interest for phenomenology as a student, Schottlaender referred more to the stoics and to Baruch Spinoza, in whose spirit he left Judaism in 1921.
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Dorothy Tarrant
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Dorothy Tarrant was a British classical scholar, specialising in Plato. She was the first female Professor of Greek in the United Kingdom, teaching at Bedford College, London from 1909 to 1950. She researched the work of Plato, pioneering the use of stylistic analysis to conclude that he had not written all the work previously attributed to him. She was active in the Classical Association and became its first woman president in 1958. She was also an active Unitarian and campaigned especially against alcohol, becoming the president of the Unitarian Temperance Association, the Unitarian Assembl...
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George Edward Woodberry
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
George Edward Woodberry, Litt. D., LL. D. was an American literary critic and poet. Biography Education Woodberry was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1855. The Woodberrys or Woodburys—various spellings of the name exist—immigrated early and, since settlement took root on the North Shore, have been native to Beverly and neighboring seaport towns. Receiving his preparation at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he entered Harvard College in 1872. He was unable to finish his class, though, due to his poor health. He returned in 1875, and he earned his degree in 1877. Woodberry took highest final honors in philosophy, and was awarded an Oration at Commencement.
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