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,
#8501
Joris-Karl Huysmans
1848 - 1907 (59 years)
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours . He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.
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Alessandro Manzoni
1785 - 1873 (88 years)
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni was an Italian poet, novelist and philosopher. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed , generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Manzoni also contributed to the stabilization of the modern Italian language and helped to ensure linguistic unity throughout Italy. He was an influential proponent of Liberal Catholicism in Italy. His work and t...
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John Webster
1578 - 1634 (56 years)
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped with Shakespeare's.
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Aristophanes
448 BC - 386 BC (62 years)
Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion , was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
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George Saintsbury
1845 - 1933 (88 years)
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA , was an English critic, literary historian, editor, teacher, and wine connoisseur. He is regarded as a highly influential critic of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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Joel Chandler Harris
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.
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Mikhail Sholokhov
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov was a Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don.
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Attar of Nishapur
1145 - 1230 (85 years)
Abū Ḥāmid bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm , better known by his pen-names Farīd ud-Dīn and ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur , was an Iranian poet, theoretician of Sufism, and hagiographer from Nishapur who had an immense and lasting influence on Persian poetry and Sufism. He wrote a collection of lyrical poems and number of long poems in the philosophical tradition of Islamic mysticism, as well as a prose work with biographies and sayings of famous Muslim mystics. The Conference of the Birds, The Book of Divine, and Memorial of the Saints are among his best known works.
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Wilhelm Grimm
1786 - 1859 (73 years)
Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author and anthropologist. He was the younger brother of Jacob Grimm, of the literary duo the Brothers Grimm. Life and work Wilhelm was born in February 1786 in Hanau, in Hesse-Kassel. In 1803, he started studying law at the University of Marburg, one year after his brother Jacob started there. The two brothers spent their entire lives close together. In their school days, they had one bed and one table in common; as students, they had two beds and two tables in the same room. They always lived under one roof and had their books and property in common. In 182...
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Pierre Louÿs
1870 - 1925 (55 years)
Pierre-Félix Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.
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Amy Lowell
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Life Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, th...
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Hugh Walpole
1884 - 1941 (57 years)
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death.
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Pierre Reverdy
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Pierre Reverdy was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing "-isms", searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: "the sublime simplicity of reality."
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Pablo Neruda
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair .
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Robinson Jeffers
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet known for his work about the central California coast. Much of Jeffers' poetry was written in narrative and epic form. However, he is also known for his shorter verse and is considered an icon of the environmental movement.
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Robert Desnos
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement. Biography Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. He also worked as an amanuensis for journalist Jean de Bonnefon. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
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Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
1724 - 1803 (79 years)
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was a German poet. His best known works are the epic poem Der Messias and the poem Die Auferstehung, that was used for Gustav Mahler's epic apocalyptic final movement of his Symphony no. 2. One of his major contributions to German literature was to open it up to exploration outside of French models.
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Gottfried Benn
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Gottfried Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951. Biography and work Family and beginnings Gottfried Benn was born in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson of pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg. He was educated in Sellin in the Neumark and Frankfurt an der Oder. To please his father, he studied theology at the University of Marburg and military medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin.
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Ken Hirano
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Ken Hirano was the pen name of a prominent Japanese literary critic and longtime professor of literature at Meiji University. His real name was Akira Hirano. Hirano was one of the seven founders of the journal Kindai Bungaku , and played a starring role in the "politics and literature debates" of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the "pure literature debate" of the early 1960s. In 1977, he was awarded the prestigious Imperial Prize from the Japan Art Academy.
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Erwin Rohde
1845 - 1898 (53 years)
Erwin Rohde was one of the great German classical scholars of the 19th century. Rohde was born in Hamburg and was the son of a doctor. Outside of antiquarian circles, Rohde is known today chiefly for his friendship and correspondence with fellow philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. The two were students together in Bonn and Leipzig, where they were studying philology taught by Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. In 1872, Rohde became a professor at the University of Kiel. He later was professor in Jena , Tübingen and finally Heidelberg, where he died in 1898 after suffering from a gradual decline in heal...
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Kazi Nazrul Islam
1899 - 1976 (77 years)
Kazi Nazrul Islam , popularly known as Nazrul, was a Bengali poet, writer, musician, and is revered as the national poet of Bangladesh. Regarded as one of the greatest poets in Bengali literature, Nazrul produced a large body of poetry, music, messages, novels, and stories with themes that included equality, justice, anti-imperialism, humanity, rebellion against oppression and religious devotion. Nazrul Islam's activism for political and social justice as well as writing a poem titled as "Bidrohī", meaning "the rebel" in Bengali, earned him the title of "Bidrohī Kôbi" . His compositions form...
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Walter Pater
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance , revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry , in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism.
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John Burroughs
1837 - 1921 (84 years)
John Burroughs was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871. In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose resonance with the tone of its cultural moment explains both its popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
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Saki
1870 - 1916 (46 years)
Hector Hugh Munro , better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
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Seán Ó Faoláin
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Irish culture. A short-story writer of international repute, he was also a leading commentator and critic. Biography Ó Faoláin was born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland. He was educated at the Presentation Brothers Secondary School in Cork. He came under the influence of Daniel Corkery, joining the Cork Dramatic Society, and increasing his knowledge of the Irish language, which he had begun in school. Shortly after entering University College, Cork, he joined the Irish Volunteers. He fought in the Irish War of Independence.
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Bruce Chatwin
1940 - 1989 (49 years)
Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English travel writer, novelist and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia , established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill , while his novel Utz was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times ranked Chatwin as number 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."
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Booth Tarkington
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams . He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered the United States' greatest living author. Several of his stories were adapted to film.
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George William Russell
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
George William Russell , who wrote with the pseudonym Æ , was an Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist. He was also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which met in Dublin for many years.
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Antonio Machado
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz , known as Antonio Machado, was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98. His work, initially modernist, evolved towards an intimate form of symbolism with romantic traits. He gradually developed a style characterised by both an engagement with humanity on one side and an almost Taoist contemplation of existence on the other, a synthesis that according to Machado echoed the most ancient popular wisdom. In Gerardo Diego's words, Machado "spoke in verse and liv...
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Vidyapati
1352 - 1448 (96 years)
Vidyapati , also known by the sobriquet Maithil Kavi Kokil , was a Maithili and Sanskrit polymath-poet-saint, playwright, composer, biographer, philosopher, law-theorist, writer, courtier and royal priest. He was a devotee of Shiva, but also wrote love songs and devotional Vaishnava songs. He knew Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha and Maithili.
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René Char
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
René Émile Char was a French poet and member of the French Resistance. Biography Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of the four children of Emile Char and Marie-Thérèse Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks. He spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.
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Ion Luca Caragiale
1852 - 1912 (60 years)
Ion Luca Caragiale , commonly referred to as I. L. Caragiale, was a Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist. Leaving behind an important cultural legacy, he is considered one of the greatest playwrights in Romanian language and literature, as well as one of its most important writers and a leading representative of local humour. Alongside Mihai Eminescu, Ioan Slavici and Ion Creangă, he is seen as one of the main representatives of Junimea, an influential literary society with which he nonetheless parted during the second half of his life.
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Lesya Ukrainka
1871 - 1913 (42 years)
Lesya Ukrainka was a Ukrainian playwright and poet who is regarded as Ukrainian literature's foremost writers. She was also an active political, civil, and feminist activist. Among her best-known works are the collections of poems On the Wings of Songs , Thoughts and Dreams , Echos , the epic poem Ancient Fairy Tale , One Word , plays Princess , Cassandra , In the Catacombs , and Forest Song .
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William Ernest Henley
1849 - 1903 (54 years)
William Ernest Henley was an English poet, writer, critic and editor. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem "Invictus". A fixture in London literary circles, the one-legged Henley might have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's character Long John Silver , while his young daughter Margaret Henley inspired J. M. Barrie's choice of the name Wendy for the heroine of his play Peter Pan .
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Jean-François Champollion
1790 - 1832 (42 years)
Jean-François Champollion , also known as Champollion le jeune , was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his mid-teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
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Thomas Middleton
1580 - 1627 (47 years)
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. He, with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, was among the most successful and prolific of playwrights at work in the Jacobean period, and among the few to gain equal success in comedy and tragedy. He was also a prolific writer of masques and pageants.
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John Clare
1793 - 1864 (71 years)
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self."
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Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
1788 - 1857 (69 years)
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff was a German poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Eichendorff was one of the major writers and critics of Romanticism. Ever since their publication and up to the present day, some of his works have been very popular in German-speaking Europe.
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Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
1636 - 1711 (75 years)
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux , often known simply as Boileau , was a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way that Blaise Pascal did to reform the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace.
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Pierre Loti
1850 - 1923 (73 years)
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories. Biography Born to a Protestant family, Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At age 17 he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list. He was in the habit of claiming that he never read books, saying to the Académie française on the day of his introduction , "Loti ne sait pas lire" , but testimony from friends proves otherwise, as does his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort.
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Salvatore Quasimodo
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Salvatore Quasimodo was an Italian poet and translator. In 1959, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he was one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.
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Gilbert Murray
1866 - 1957 (91 years)
George Gilbert Aimé Murray was an Australian-born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century. He is the basis for the character of Adolphus Cusins in his friend George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, and also appears as the chorus figure in Tony Harrison's play Fram.
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Käte Hamburger
1896 - 1992 (96 years)
Käte Hamburger was a Germanist, literary scholar and philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Stuttgart. Hamburger earned her doctorate in 1922 in Munich. Expelled by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage, she immigrated to Sweden in 1934, where she lived until 1956, earning her living as a language teacher, journalist and writer. She resumed her university career on her return to Germany, writing about Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
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Mori Ōgai
1862 - 1922 (60 years)
Lieutenant-General Mori Rintarō, known by his pen name Mori Ōgai, was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist, poet and father of famed author Mari Mori. He obtained his medical license at a very young age and introduced translated German language literary works to the Japanese public. Mori Ōgai also was considered the first to successfully express the art of western poetry in Japanese. He wrote many works and created many writing styles. The Wild Geese is considered his major work. After his death, he was considered one of the leading writers who modernized Japanese lit...
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Erich Maria Remarque
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Erich Maria Remarque was a German-born novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front , based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was an international bestseller which created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. The book was adapted to film several times. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic." He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and the United States where he became a naturalized citizen.
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Ælfric of Eynsham
950 - 1010 (60 years)
Ælfric of Eynsham was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian , Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist. In the view of Peter Hunter Blair, he was "a man comparable both in the quantity of his writings and in the quality of his mind even with Bede himself." According to Claudio Leonardi, he "represented the highest pinnacle of Benedictine reform and Anglo-Saxon literature".
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Nâzım Hikmet
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Mehmed Nâzım Ran , commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet Family According to Nâzım Hikmet, he was of paternal Turkish and maternal German, Polish and Georgian descent. His mother came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family with predominantly-Circassian roots, along with high social position and relations to the Polish nobility. From his father's side, he had Turkish heritage. His father, Hikmet Bey, was the son of Çerkes Nâzım Pasha, another Circassian, after whom Nâzım Hikmet was named.
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Marcus Manilius
100 - 50 (-50 years)
Marcus Manilius was a Roman poet, astrologer, and author of a poem in five books called Astronomica. The Astronomica The author of Astronomica is neither quoted nor mentioned by any ancient writer. Even his name is uncertain, but it was probably Marcus Manilius; in the earlier books the author is anonymous, the later give Manilius, Manlius, Mallius. The poem itself implies that the writer lived under Augustus or Tiberius, and that he was a citizen of and resident in Rome, suggesting that Manilius wrote the work during the 20s CE. According to the early 18th century classicist Richard Bentley, he was an Asiatic Greek; according to the 19th-century classicist Fridericus Jacob, an African.
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Pietro Aretino
1492 - 1556 (64 years)
Pietro Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.
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Phillis Wheatley
1753 - 1784 (31 years)
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
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