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,
#8651
Carlo Goldoni
1707 - 1794 (87 years)
Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade...
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Katherine Anne Porter
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim.
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Kahlil Gibran
1883 - 1931 (48 years)
Gibran Khalil Gibran , usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran , was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist; he was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.
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Tobias Smollett
1721 - 1771 (50 years)
Tobias George Smollett was a Scottish novelist, surgeon, critic and playwright. He was best known for picaresque novels such as The Adventures of Roderick Random , The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker , which influenced later novelists, including Charles Dickens. His novels were liberally altered by contemporary printers; an authoritative edition of each was edited by Dr O. M. Brack Jr and others.
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George Herbert
1593 - 1633 (40 years)
George Herbert was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists." He was born in Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the Parliament of England in 1624 ...
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Lin Carter
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
Linwood Vrooman Carter was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor, poet and critic. He usually wrote as Lin Carter; known pseudonyms include H. P. Lowcraft and Grail Undwin. He is best known for his work in the 1970s as editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which introduced readers to many overlooked classics of the fantasy genre.
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Malcolm Cowley
1898 - 1989 (91 years)
Malcolm Cowley was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, Blue Juniata , and his memoir, Exile's Return , written as a chronicler and fellow traveller of the Lost Generation and an influential editor and talent scout at Viking Press.
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Italo Calvino
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .
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Jean Anouilh
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. His plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromi...
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Samuil Marshak
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak was a Soviet writer of Belarusian Jewish origin, translator and poet who wrote for both children and adults. He translated the sonnets and some other of the works of William Shakespeare, English poetry , and poetry from other languages. Maxim Gorky proclaimed Marshak to be "the founder of Russia's children's literature".
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Bai Juyi
772 - 846 (74 years)
Bai Juyi , courtesy name Letian , was a Chinese musician, poet, and politician during the Tang dynasty. Many of his poems concern his career or observations made about everyday life, including as governor of three different provinces. He achieved fame as a writer of verse in a low-key, near vernacular style that was popular throughout medieval East Asia.
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Arthur Schnitzler
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist. He is considered one of the most significant representatives of the Viennese Modernism. Schnitzler’s works, which include psychological dramas and narratives, dissected turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeois life, making him a sharp and stylistically conscious chronicler of Viennese society around 1900.
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Petronius
27 - 66 (39 years)
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian era . He is one of the most important characters in Henryk Sienkiewicz' historical novel Quo Vadis . Leo Genn portrays him in the 1951 film of the same name.
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Bacchylides
516 BC - 451 BC (65 years)
Bacchylides was a Greek lyric poet. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets, which included his uncle Simonides. The elegance and polished style of his lyrics have been noted in Bacchylidean scholarship since at least Longinus. Some scholars have characterized these qualities as superficial charm. He has often been compared unfavourably with his contemporary, Pindar, as "a kind of Boccherini to Pindar's Haydn". However, the differences in their styles do not allow for easy comparison, and translator Robert Fagles has written that "to blame Bacchylides for not being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn ...
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Blaise Cendrars
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Frédéric-Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
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Henryk Sienkiewicz
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz , also known by the pseudonym Litwos , was a Polish writer. He is best remembered for his historical novels, such as the Trilogy series and especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis .
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Sherwood Anderson
1876 - 1941 (65 years)
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer.
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Georges Bataille
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
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Bret Harte
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Bret Harte was an American short story writer and poet best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials and magazine sketches.
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Ennius
239 BC - 169 BC (70 years)
Quintus Ennius was a writer and poet who lived during the Roman Republic. He is often considered the father of Roman poetry. He was born in the small town of Rudiae, located near modern Lecce, Apulia, , a town founded by the Messapians, and could speak Greek as well as Latin and Oscan . Although only fragments of his works survive, his influence in Latin literature was significant, particularly in his use of Greek literary models.
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Paul Celan
1920 - 1970 (50 years)
Paul Celan , born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian poet and translator, regarded as one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
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William Cullen Bryant
1794 - 1878 (84 years)
William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Born in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life. He soon relocated to New York and took up work as an editor at various newspapers. He became one of the most significant poets in early literary America and has been grouped among the fireside poets for his accessible, popular poetry.
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Christoph Martin Wieland
1733 - 1813 (80 years)
Christoph Martin Wieland was a German poet and writer. He is best-remembered for having written the first Bildungsroman , as well as the epic Oberon, which formed the basis for Carl Maria von Weber's opera of the same name. His thought was representative of the cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment, exemplified in his remark: "Only a true cosmopolitan can be a good citizen."
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Vicente Aleixandre
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars". He was part of the Generation of '27.
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Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was a Norwegian writer who received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit". The first Norwegian Nobel laureate, he was a prolific polemicist and extremely influential in Norwegian public life and Scandinavian cultural debate. Bjørnson is considered to be one of the four great Norwegian writers, alongside Ibsen, Lie, and Kielland. He is also celebrated for his lyrics to the Norwegian national anthem, "Ja, vi elsker dette landet".
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H.D.
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during...
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Dashiell Hammett
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.
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Ivan Goncharov
1812 - 1891 (79 years)
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known for his novels The Same Old Story , Oblomov , and The Precipice . He also served in many official capacities, including the position of censor.
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Jean Paul
1763 - 1825 (62 years)
Jean Paul was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories. Life and work Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtel Mountains . His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof and, in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. Later in life, Jean Paul noted, "The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity." After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, in 1781 Jean Paul went to the University of Leipzig.
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Mikhail Bulgakov
1891 - 1940 (49 years)
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian, later Soviet writer, medical doctor, and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
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Malcolm Muggeridge
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament . Malcolm's brother Eric was one of the founders of Plan International. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the experience turned him into an anti-communist.
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Yukio Mishima
1925 - 1970 (45 years)
Kimitake Hiraoka, also known as Yukio Mishima, was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the . Mishima is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels and , and the autobiographical essay . Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive a...
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Shirley Jackson
1916 - 1965 (49 years)
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
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Jean Genet
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers and the plays The Balcony, The Maids and The Screens.
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Banjo Paterson
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include "Clancy of the Overflow" , "The Man from Snowy River" and "Waltzing Matilda" , regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem.
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Hugo von Hofmannsthal
1874 - 1929 (55 years)
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist. Early life Hofmannsthal was born in Landstraße, Vienna, the son of an upper-class Christian Austrian mother, Anna Maria Josefa Fohleutner , and a Christian Austrian–Italian bank manager, Hugo August Peter Hofmann, Edler von Hofmannsthal .
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W. Somerset Maugham
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth , a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last...
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José Rizal
1861 - 1896 (35 years)
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is considered a national hero of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
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Benito Pérez Galdós
1843 - 1920 (77 years)
Benito Pérez Galdós was a Spanish realist novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.
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Giosuè Carducci
1835 - 1907 (72 years)
Giosuè Alessandro Giuseppe Carducci was an Italian poet, writer, literary critic and teacher. He was noticeably influential, and was regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy. In 1906, he became the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy's motivation was that "not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces."
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John Galsworthy
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright. He is best known for his trilogy of novels collectively called The Forsyte Saga, and two later trilogies, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Andal
800 - 900 (100 years)
Andal , also known as Kothai, Nachiyar, and Godadevi, was the only female Alvar among the twelve Hindu poet-saints of South India. She was posthumously considered an avatar of the goddess Bhudevi. As with the Alvar saints, she was affiliated with the Sri Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Active in the 8th-century, with some suggesting 7th-century, Andal is credited with two great Tamil works, Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoḻi, which are still recited by devotees during the winter festival season of Margaḻi. Andal is a prominent figure for women in South India and has inspired several women's gro...
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Stefan Zweig
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister , and decisive historical events in Decisive Moments in History . He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché , Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette , among others. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman , Amok , Fear , Confus...
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Zora Neale Hurston
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
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François Villon
1431 - 1463 (32 years)
François Villon is the best known French poet of the Late Middle Ages. He was involved in criminal behavior and had multiple encounters with law enforcement authorities. Villon wrote about some of these experiences in his poems.
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Zygmunt Krasiński
1812 - 1859 (47 years)
Napoleon Stanisław Adam Feliks Zygmunt Krasiński was a Polish poet traditionally ranked after Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki as one of Poland's Three Bards – the Romantic poets who influenced national consciousness in the period of Partitions of Poland.
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Maurice Barrès
1862 - 1923 (61 years)
Auguste-Maurice Barrès was a French novelist, journalist and politician. Spending some time in Italy, he became a figure in French literature with the release of his work The Cult of the Self in 1888. In politics, he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889 as a Boulangist and would play a prominent political role for the rest of his life.
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James M. Cain
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
James Mallahan Cain was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction. His novels The Postman Always Rings Twice , Double Indemnity , Serenade , Mildred Pierce and The Butterfly brought him critical acclaim and an immense popular readership in America and abroad.
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Peter Christen Asbjørnsen
1812 - 1885 (73 years)
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen was a Norwegian writer and scholar. He and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe were collectors of Norwegian folklore. They were so closely united in their lives' work that their folk tale collections are commonly mentioned only as "Asbjørnsen and Moe".
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Alejo Carpentier
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himse...
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