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,
#8551
Osamu Dazai
1909 - 1948 (39 years)
Shūji Tsushima, known by his pen name Osamu Dazai, was a Japanese novelist and author. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human , are considered modern-day classics.
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Marc Connelly
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Marcus Cook Connelly was an American playwright, director, producer, performer, and lyricist. He was a key member of the Algonquin Round Table, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930. Biography Connelly was born to actor and hotelier Patrick Joseph Connelly and actress Mabel Fowler Cook in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. His father died in 1902. Connelly attended Trinity Hall boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania, after which he began collecting money for ads in The Pittsburgh Press to help to support his mother. He began writing plays at the age of five.
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Theodor Fontane
1819 - 1898 (79 years)
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist author. He published the first of his novels, for which he is best known today, only at age 58 after a career as a journalist.
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Edward FitzGerald
1809 - 1883 (74 years)
Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer. His most famous poem is the first and best-known English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which has kept its reputation and popularity since the 1860s.
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Henry Vaughan
1621 - 1695 (74 years)
Henry Vaughan was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author and translator writing in English, and a medical physician. His religious poetry appeared in Silex Scintillans in 1650, with a second part in 1655. In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished was published. Meanwhile he had been persuaded by reading the religious poet George Herbert to renounce "idle verse". The prose Mount of Olives and Solitary Devotions show his authenticity and depth of convictions. Two more volumes of secular verse followed, ostensibly without his sanction, but it is his religious verse that has been acclaimed.
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Thomas Holley Chivers
1809 - 1858 (49 years)
Thomas Holley Chivers was an American doctor-turned-poet from the state of Georgia. He is best known for his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe and his controversial defense of the poet after his death.
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Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
1690 - 1751 (61 years)
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai , commonly known by the honorifics Lakhino Latif, Latif Ghot, Bhittai, and Bhit Jo Shah, was a Sindhi Sufi mystic and poet from Pakistan, widely considered to be the greatest poet of the Sindhi language.
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Ogiwara Seisensui
1884 - 1976 (92 years)
was the pen-name of Ogiwara Tōkichi, a Japanese haiku poet active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan. Early life Ogiwara Tōkichi was born in Shinmei, Shiba, Tokyo City , the second son of a merchant who owned a general goods store called Nitta-ya. The Ogiwara family was originally from Takada, Echigo Province , and his grandfather Tōkichi had moved to Edo as a young man. Both of his siblings died in infancy. Although he attended Seisoku Junior High School, Ogiwara was expelled after publishing a student newspaper criticizing the school's educational methods and administration. After ...
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Ernest Thompson Seton
1860 - 1946 (86 years)
Ernest Thompson Seton was an English-born Canadian-American author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians in 1902 , and one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.
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Jovan Sterija Popović
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Jovan Sterija Popović was a Serbian playwright, poet, lawyer, philosopher and pedagogue who taught at the Belgrade Higher School. Sterija was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the leading Serbian intellectuals and he is regarded as one of the best comic playwrights in Serbian literature.
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Michael Drayton
1563 - 1631 (68 years)
Michael Drayton was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era, continuing to write through the reign of James I and into the reign of Charles I. Many of his works consisted of historical poetry. He was also the first English-language author to write odes in the style of Horace. He died on 23 December 1631 in London.
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Randall Jarrell
1914 - 1965 (51 years)
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
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Erskine Caldwell
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States, in novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim.
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Leopoldo Marechal
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Leopoldo Marechal was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century. Biographical notes Born in Buenos Aires into a family of French and Spanish descent, Marechal became a primary school teacher and a high school professor after obtaining his degree despite enormous economic difficulties. During the 1920s he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martín Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos and Días como flechas , tended towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer showed a blend of novelty and a more classical style.
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Oscar Levertin
1862 - 1906 (44 years)
Oscar Ivar Levertin was a Swedish poet, critic and literary historian. Levertin was a dominant voice of the Swedish cultural scene from 1897, when he started writing influential high-profile essays and reviews in the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet.
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Thomas Love Peacock
1785 - 1866 (81 years)
Thomas Love Peacock was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting: characters at a table discussing and criticising the philosophical opinions of the day.
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Baldassare Castiglione
1478 - 1529 (51 years)
Baldassare Castiglione, Count of Casatico , was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissance author. Castiglione wrote Il Cortegiano or The Book of the Courtier, a courtesy book dealing with questions of the etiquette and morality of the courtier. It was very influential in 16th-century European court circles.
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Charles Beaumont
1929 - 1967 (38 years)
Charles Beaumont was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Static", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, such as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death.
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John William Polidori
1795 - 1821 (26 years)
John William Polidori was a British writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" , the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori.
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Christian Morgenstern
1871 - 1914 (43 years)
Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern was a German writer and poet from Munich. Morgenstern married Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern on 7 March 1910. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin, but spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, primarily in a vain attempt to recover his health. His travels, though they failed to restore him to health, allowed him to meet many of the foremost literary and philosophical figures of his time in central Europe.
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Ruth Plumly Thompson
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Ruth Plumly Thompson was an American writer of children's stories, best known for writing many novels placed in Oz, the fictional land of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels.
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Henry de Montherlant
1895 - 1972 (77 years)
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960. Biography Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary . His mother, a formerly lively socialite, became chronically ill due to the difficult childbirth, being bedridden most of the time, and dying at the young age of 43.
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Jean Cocteau
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man."
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Elizabeth Montagu
1718 - 1800 (82 years)
Elizabeth Montagu was a British social reformer, patron of the arts, salonnière, literary critic and writer, who helped to organize and lead the Blue Stockings Society. Her parents were both from wealthy families with strong ties to the British peerage and learned life. She was sister to Sarah Scott, author of A Description of Millenium [sic] Hall and the Country Adjacent. She married Edward Montagu, a man with extensive landholdings, to become one of the richer women of her era. She devoted this fortune to fostering English and Scottish literature and to the relief of the poor.
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James Thomson
1700 - 1748 (48 years)
James Thomson was a Scottish poet and playwright, known for his poems The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and for the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia!" Scotland, 1700–1725 James Thomson was born in Ednam in Roxburghshire around 11 September 1700 and baptised on 15 September. He was the fourth of nine children of Thomas Thomson and Beatrix Thomson . Beatrix Thomson was born in Fogo, Berwickshire and was a distant relation of the house of Hume. Thomas Thomson was the Presbyterian minister of Ednam until eight weeks after Thomson's birth, when he was admitted as minister of Southdean, where Thom...
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Maxim Antonovich
1835 - 1918 (83 years)
Maxim Alexeyevich Antonovich was a Russian literary critic, essayist, memoirist, translator and philosopher. Biography Maxim Antonovich was born in Belopolye, Sumskoy Uyezd, Kharkov Governorate, to the family of a clergyman. After studying at the Kharkiv seminary he enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy which he graduated in 1859.
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Marie Laurencin
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or. Biography Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil painting. During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A member of both the circle of Pablo P...
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Matthias Castrén
1813 - 1852 (39 years)
Matthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish Swedish ethnologist and philologist who was a pioneer in the study of the Uralic languages. He was an educator, author and linguist at the University of Helsinki. Castrén is best known for his research in the linguistics and ethnography of the Finnic, Ugric and Samoyedic peoples.
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Jibanananda Das
1899 - 1954 (55 years)
Jibanananda Das was an Indian poet, writer, novelist and essayist in the Bengali language , Das is the most read poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bangladesh and West Bengal. While not particularly well recognised during his lifetime, today Das is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language.
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William York Tindall
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
William York Tindall was an American Joyceanan scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University. Several of Tindall's classic works of criticism, including A Reader's Guide to James Joyce and A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake are still in print. He wrote a total of thirteen books on UK and Irish writers including Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Tindall nominated Beckett for the Nobel Prize in Literature; Beckett was the 1969 laureate.
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Ring Lardner
1885 - 1933 (48 years)
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing, and author John O'Hara directly attributed his understanding of dialogue to him.
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Lorraine Hansberry
1930 - 1965 (35 years)
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.
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Karl Müllenhoff
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Karl Viktor Müllenhoff was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography He was born in Marne, Holstein as the second son of merchant Johann Anton Müllenhoff. In his youth, he received his education in the town of Meldorf . He later studied under Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch at the University of Kiel, then continued his education at Leipzig and then in Berlin , where his instructors included Karl Lachmann and Wilhelm Grimm. In 1841 he received his PhD at Kiel with a dissertation on Sophocles.
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Charles Maurras
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, politician, poet, and critic. He was an organizer and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that is monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-communist, anti-Masonic, anti-Protestant, and anti-Semitic views, although he was highly critical of Nazism, referring to it as "stupidity". His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, led by his tenet that "a true nationalist places his country above everything".
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Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau
1749 - 1791 (42 years)
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau was a French writer, orator, statesman and a prominent figure of the early stages of the French Revolution. A member of the nobility, Mirabeau had been involved in numerous scandals that had left his reputation in ruins. Well-known for his oratory skills, Mirabeau quickly rose to the top of the French political hierarchy following his election to the Estates-General in 1789, and was recognized as a leader of the newly organized National Assembly. Among the revolutionaries, Mirabeau was an advocate of the moderate position of constitutional monarchy built on the model of Great Britain.
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Hristo Botev
1847 - 1876 (29 years)
Hristo Botev , born Hristo Botyov Petkov , was a Bulgarian revolutionary and poet. Botev is considered by Bulgarians to be a symbolic historical figure and national hero. His poetry is a prime example of the literature of the Bulgarian National Revival, though he is considered to be ahead of his contemporaries in his political, philosophical, and aesthetic views.
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Henrik Steffens
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Henrik Steffens , was a Norwegian philosopher, scientist, and poet. Early life, education, and lectures He was born at Stavanger. At the age of fourteen he went with his parents to Copenhagen, where he studied theology and natural science. In 1796 he lectured at the University of Kiel, and two years later went to the University of Jena to study the natural philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. He went to Freiberg in 1800, and there came under the influence of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1801, he published a volume on geology called Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde. which became his most successful and influential work as a scientist.
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Alexander Veselovsky
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Veselovsky was a leading Russian literary theorist who laid the groundwork for comparative literary studies. Life and work A general's son, Veselovsky studied privately with Fyodor Buslaev and attended the Moscow University from 1854 to 1858. After a brief stint in Spain as a tutor to the Russian ambassador's son, Veselovsky continued his education with Heymann Steinthal in Berlin and Prague and spent three years working in the libraries of Italy. Upon his return to Russia, he delivered lectures in Moscow and St. Petersburg and was elected a Member of the St. Petersbur...
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Sarah Orne Jewett
1849 - 1909 (60 years)
Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern coast of Maine. Jewett is recognized as an important practitioner of American literary regionalism.
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Venantius Fortunatus
530 - 609 (79 years)
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus , known as Saint Venantius Fortunatus , was a Latin poet and hymnographer in the Merovingian Court, and a bishop of the Early Church who has been venerated since the Middle Ages.
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Richmal Crompton
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Richmal Crompton Lamburn was a popular English writer, best known for her Just William series of books, humorous short stories, and to a lesser extent adult fiction books. Life Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire, the second child of the Rev. Edward John Sewell Lamburn, a Classics master at Bury Grammar School and his wife Clara . Her brother, John Battersby Crompton Lamburn, also became a writer, remembered under the name John Lambourne for his fantasy novel The Kingdom That Was , a story set in Africa in a prehistoric past when animals could talk, with warring species and...
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W. H. Davies
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
William Henry Davies was a Welsh poet and writer, who spent much of his life as a tramp or hobo in the United Kingdom and the United States, yet became one of the most popular poets of his time. His themes included observations on life's hardships, the ways the human condition is reflected in nature, his tramping adventures and the characters he met. His work has been classed to as Georgian, though it is not typical of that class of work in theme or style.
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Thomas Shadwell
1642 - 1692 (50 years)
Thomas Shadwell was an English poet and playwright who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1689. Life Shadwell was born at either Bromehill Farm, Weeting-with-Broomhill or Santon House, Lynford, Norfolk, and educated at Bury St Edmunds School, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree and joined the Middle Temple. At the Whig triumph in 1688, he superseded John Dryden as poet laureate and historiographer royal. He died at Chelsea on 19 November 1692. He was buried in Chelsea Old Church, but his tomb was destroyed by wartime bombing.
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Curzio Malaparte
1898 - 1957 (59 years)
Curzio Malaparte , born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian writer, filmmaker, war correspondent and diplomat. Malaparte is best known outside Italy due to his works Kaputt and The Skin . The former is a semi-fictionalised account of the Eastern Front during the Second World War and the latter is an account focusing on morality in the immediate post-war period of Naples .
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Wu Mi
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Wu Mi Education In 1903, Wu Mi went to an old-style private school, where his classmates ranged from ten to thirty years old, to begin studying Sinology systematically in Xi'an. He read Confucian classics such as Spring and Autumn Annals, Zuo Zhuan. He also read Xinmin Series Newspaper Shanghai Vernacular Newspaper , the papers sent by his family from Shanghai. He also tried writing novels, but did not succeed.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage
1826 - 1898 (72 years)
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism , and freethought . She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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Dmytro Chyzhevsky
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Dmytro Ivanovych Chyzhevsky was a Ukrainian-born scholar of Slavic literature, history, culture and philosophy. Biography Early life Dmytro Chyzhevsky was born of Russian-Polish-Ukrainian ancestry on 3 March 1894, at Oleksandriia, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, near the Black Sea. His first interest was philosophy, and his teachers were Nikolay Lossky, Vasyl Zenkivskyi, and Georgy Chelpanov. From 1911 to 1913 he studied philosophy and literature at the University of St. Petersburg and afterwards at the department of history and philology at St. Volodymyr University of Kyi...
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Emily Hale
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read. The day the Hale letter...
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Owen Wister
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Biography Early life Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown, a neighborhood in the northwestern part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician raised at Grumblethorpe in Germantown. He was a distant cousin of Sally Wister through his descent from John Wister , brother of Caspar Wistar. His mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of Fanny Kemble, a British actress, and Pierce Mease Butler.
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