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,
#8751
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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Rudolf Kassner
1873 - 1959 (86 years)
Rudolf Kassner was an Austrian writer, essayist, translator and cultural philosopher. Although stricken as an infant with poliomyelitis, Kassner traveled widely to northern Africa, the Sahara, India, Russia, Spain, and throughout Europe. His translations of William Blake introduced this English romantic poet to German-speaking audiences. His literary career covered six decades, including a period of isolation during the Nazi years in Vienna. His writings on physiognomy reflect his effort to understand the problems of modernity and Man's subsequent disconnectedness from time and place. His lat...
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Emilio Salgari
1862 - 1911 (49 years)
Emilio Salgari was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction. In Italy, his extensive body of work was more widely read than that of Dante Alighieri. Today he is still among the 40 most translated Italian authors. Many of his most popular novels have been adapted as comics, animated series and feature films. He is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the "grandfather" of the Spaghetti Western.
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Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy , often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy, was a Russian poet, novelist, and playwright. He is considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist, primarily on account of the strength of his dramatic trilogy The Death of Ivan the Terrible , Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich , and Tsar Boris . He also gained fame for his satirical works, published under his own name and under the collaborational pen name of Kozma Prutkov. His fictional works include the novella The Family of the Vourdalak, The Vampire , and the historical novel Prince Sere...
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Victoria Woodhull
1838 - 1927 (89 years)
Victoria Claflin Woodhull , later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35.
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Eugène Sue
1804 - 1857 (53 years)
Marie-Joseph "Eugène" Sue was a French novelist. He was one of several authors who popularized the genre of the serial novel in France with his very popular and widely imitated The Mysteries of Paris, which was published in a newspaper from 1842 to 1843.
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Chester Himes
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works, some of which have been filmed, include If He Hollers Let Him Go, published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series of novels for which he is best known, set in the 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In 1958 Himes won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
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George Borrow
1803 - 1881 (78 years)
George Henry Borrow was an English writer of novels and of travel based on personal experiences in Europe. His travels gave him a close affinity with the Romani people of Europe, who figure strongly in his work. His best-known books are The Bible in Spain and the novels Lavengro and The Romany Rye, set in his time with the English Romanichal .
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Ruth Manning-Sanders
1886 - 1988 (102 years)
Ruth Manning-Sanders was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide. She published over 90 books in her lifetime
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Charles Warren Stoddard
1843 - 1909 (66 years)
Charles Warren Stoddard was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life. Biography Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York on August 7, 1843. He was descended in a direct line from Anthony Stoddard of England, who settled at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1639.
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Peter Mark Roget
1779 - 1869 (90 years)
Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words. He also read a paper to the Royal Society about a peculiar optical illusion in 1824, which is often regarded as the origin of the persistence of vision theory that was later commonly used to explain apparent motion in film and animation.
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Comte de Lautréamont
1846 - 1870 (24 years)
Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse , a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.
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Innokenty Annensky
1855 - 1909 (54 years)
Innokenty Fyodorovich Annensky Biography Annensky was born into the family of a public official in Omsk on 1 September [O.S. 20 August] 1855. In 1860, while still a child, he was taken to Saint Petersburg. Annensky lost his parents early on, and was raised in the family of his older brother, Nikolai Annensky, a prominent Narodnik and political activist.
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