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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8851
Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
Go to Profile#8852
Dámaso Alonso
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Dámaso Alonso y Fernández de las Redondas was a Spanish poet, philologist and literary critic. Though a member of the Generation of '27, his best-known work dates from the 1940s onwards. Early life and education Born in Madrid on 22 October 1898, Alonso studied Law, Philosophy and Literature before undertaking research at Madrid's Centro de Estudios Históricos. An enthusiastic participant in the cultural and literary life at the famous Residencia de estudiantes , Alonso also wrote for the literary magazines Revista de Occidente and Los Cuatro Vientos .
Go to Profile#8853
Hermann Mutschmann
1882 - 1918 (36 years)
Hermann Mutschmann was a German classical philologist. He studied classical philology at the University of Bonn as a pupil of Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler, then continued his education at the University of Kiel under Siegfried Sudhaus. In 1906 he received his doctorate at Kiel with a dissertation on Aristotle, titled De divisionibus quae vulgo dicuntur Aristoteleis. In 1907/08 he took a study tour of Italy, followed by work as a tutor in Bonn. In 1910 he obtained his habilitation for classical philology, and in 1913 succeeded Christian Cornelius Jensen as an associate professor at the University of Königsberg.
Go to Profile#8854
Elizabeth Bishop
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
Go to Profile#8855
Friedrich Klingner
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Friedrich Klingner was a German Classical Philologist. He worked at increasingly senior levels as a university professor, successively at the universities of Hamburg , Leipzig and Munich . Viewed by admirers as one of the leading latinists of his generation, he advanced the study of Latin literature, producing important studies of Sallust, Virgil, Horace and Tibullus which continue to engage scholars.
Go to Profile#8856
Daud Kamal
1935 - 1987 (52 years)
Daud Kamal His poetry was influenced by modernist English-language poets like Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Education and career Born in Abbottabad in 1935, the son of Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, who served as the vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar, and was the founder of the Jinnah College for Women in 1964, he received his early education from the Burn Hall Abbottabad there followed by Burn Hall Srinagar, before going to the Islamia College Peshawar. Then, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Peshawar and the Tripos from the University of Cambridge...
Go to Profile#8857
Karl Praechter
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Karl Praechter was a German classical philologist. From 1877 he studied theology in Lausanne, followed by studies of classical philology at several German universities. He worked as a gymnasium teacher in the municipalities of Durlach and Bruchsal, and in 1889 obtained his habilitation in classical philology from the University of Bern. In 1899 he became a full professor at Bern, and later relocated to the University of Halle, where from 1907 to 1926, he served as a professor of classical philology.
Go to Profile#8858
Wolfgang Aly
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Wolfgang Aly was a German classical philologist. He was a member of the NSDAP . On 1 December 1931, he joined and was the first member of the NSDAP of Freiburg University. Works See also External links section below.
Go to Profile#8859
Wirt Williams
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Wirt Williams was an American novelist, journalist, and professor of English. Early life and education Born on August 21, 1921, on the campus of the Goodman, Mississippi-based agricultural school headed by his father , Williams was raised in Cleveland, Mississippi where he was graduated from Cleveland High School . Williams took his undergraduate degree at Delta State University and in 1941, was awarded a master's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#8860
Alexander Laing
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Alexander Kinnan Laing was a poet, novelist, writer and compiler of sea stories, and professor. He spent his career at Dartmouth College, where he also studied. Life and career Laing dropped out of Dartmouth in 1925 and spent two years at sea, an experience that informed much of his later work. He served on the SS Leviathan, a German-built passenger liner that had been seized by the United States in 1917. On the Leviathan, he sailed to Southampton and, later, to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. He retained his affection for the sea, using a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934 to sail around the wo...
Go to Profile#8861
Utuy Tatang Sontani
1920 - 1979 (59 years)
Utuy Tatang Sontani was an Indonesian writer and university lecturer. He was born in Cianjur, West Java. In 1938 he attended an adult school in Bandung, and then became a civil servant. After the independence of Indonesia in 1945, he successively worked for National Broadcasting Station and Books Compilation & Translation Bureau. In 1959 he joined the People's Culture Association, and became a member of its central committee. He lived abroad after 1965, mainly in the Soviet Union, taught at Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, died and was buried in Moscow.
Go to Profile#8862
Vasile Grecu
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Vasile Grecu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian philologist and Byzantinist. Born in Mitocu Dragomirnei, north of Suceava, his parents were Manole Greciuc and Ana . He studied at the Greek-Orthodox Gymnasium in Suceava , followed by the Universities of Vienna and Czernowitz , where Sextil Pușcariu was his professor. From 1910 to 1914, he taught Latin and Greek at the state high school in Câmpulung Moldovenesc. After the outbreak of World War I, he took refuge in the Romanian Old Kingdom. There, he was a proofreader at Monitorul Oficial in Bucharest and a substitute teacher at Mircea cel Batrân High School in Constanța until Romania entered the war in August 1916.
Go to Profile#8863
Alexander Serafimovich
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Alexander Serafimovich was a Russian/Soviet writer and a member of the Moscow literary group Sreda. Biography He was born in a Cossack village on the Don River. His father served as a paymaster in a Cossack regiment. He attended a grammar school, then studied in the Physics and Mathematics faculty of St. Petersburg University. During his time at the University he became friends with Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother, who introduced him to Marxism. He was later exiled to Mezen, a town in northern Russia, for spreading revolutionary propaganda. While in exile he wrote his first story, which was published in Russkiye Vedomosti.
Go to Profile#8864
G. T. Deshpande
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Ganesh Trimbak Deshpande , was an Indian writer, scholar and critic from Maharashtra. Deshpande has authored more than 12 classical works. He has attained international renown and recognition by his scholarly contribution to literary treasure. His Bharatiya Sahitya Shastra work published in 1958, brought him the highest national literary distinction of Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959.
Go to Profile#8865
Toshio Shimao
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Toshio Shimao was a Japanese novelist. He has been called a "writer's writer", which is used as both a compliment and criticism. Biography Shimao was born in Yokohama, but his family moved to Kobe when he was eight. His mother died when he was seventeen and soon after he had a period of study in Nagasaki. He later traveled to Taiwan and the Philippines, but returned to education and graduated from Kyushu University in 1943. In 1944 he entered the military and was sent to Japan's southern Amami Islands as an officer for a naval suicide attack squadron in World War II. The war ended while he was still waiting for his orders.
Go to Profile#8866
C. Hugh Holman
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
C. Hugh Holman was an American literary scholar, academic administrator and detective novelist. He was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and its Provost from 1966 to 1968. He was the vice president of the National Humanities Center. He was the author of many books about Southern literature, and the founding co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. He was the recipient of several awards.
Go to Profile#8867
William Lorimer
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
William Laughton Lorimer, FBA was a Scottish scholar. Born at Strathmartine on the outskirts of Dundee, he was educated at the High School of Dundee, Fettes College, and Trinity College, Oxford. He is best known for the translation of the New Testament into Scots.
Go to Profile#8868
Bernhard Seuffert
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Bernhard Seuffert was a German-Austrian philologist, specializing in German studies. From 1871 he studied classical philology, history and German studies at the University of Würzburg, and afterwards continued his education at Strasbourg as a student of Wilhelm Scherer, Elias von Steinmeyer and Wilhelm Studemund. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation, and subsequently replaced Erich Schmidt as a lecturer at Würzburg. In 1886, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz, where from 1892 to 1924 he worked as a full professor of German philology. In 1913/14 he served as university ...
Go to Profile#8869
A. C. Bradley
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Andrew Cecil Bradley, was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare. Life Bradley was born at Park Hill, Clapham, then in Surrey but now part of London. His father was the preacher Charles Bradley , vicar of Glasbury, a noted evangelical Anglican preacher and leader of the so-called Clapham Sect. Charles had thirteen children by his first wife, who died in 1831, and nine by his second wife Emma Linton. Bradley was the youngest of the nine born to Emma and Charles; his older brother, philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, was the fifth. Bradley studied at Balliol College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#8870
René Bazin
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
René François Nicolas Marie Bazin was a French novelist. Biography Born at Angers, he studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became Professor of Law in the Catholic university. In 1876, Bazin married Aline Bricard. The couple had two sons and six daughters. He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, and wrote Stephanette , but he made his reputation with Une Tache d'Encre , which received a prize from the Academy. He was admitted to the Académie française on 28 April 1904, to replace Ernest Legouvé.
Go to Profile#8871
M. K. Joseph
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Michael Kennedy Joseph was a British-born New Zealand poet and novelist in several genres. He studied at Sacred Heart College, Auckland, and at Merton College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1939. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Artillery. His works range from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth to a historical novel, Kaspar's Journey, based on the medieval Children's Crusade. The Hole in the Zero includes the first known use of the word "hoverboard".
Go to Profile#8872
Ehm Welk
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Emil "Ehm" Welk was a German journalist, writer, professor and founder of Volkshochschulen . He became known for his work Die Heiden von Kummerow and used Thomas Trimm as a pseudonym. Life Welk was born as the son of a farmer in Biesenbrow , Brandenburg. After frequenting the village school, the 16-year-old moved away from home, completed a commercial education, worked on the sea and as a journalist for several papers, e.g. in Brunswick for the Braunschweiger Allgemeiner Anzeiger, whose editor-in-chief he was from 1910 on to 1919. Afterwards, he worked for the Braunschweiger Morgenzeitung.
Go to Profile#8873
Mitsuo Nakamura
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Mitsuo Nakamura was the pen-name of a writer of biographies and stage-plays, and a literary critic active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Koba Ichirō. Early life Nakamura Mitsuo was born in Tokyo, in the plebeian district of Shitaya, . In 1923, he attended the Tokyo Normal High School, where one of his classmates was Kaoru Ishikawa. He studied the French language while at the First Higher School, and in April 1931, he entered the Tokyo Imperial University’s Law School. He dropped out after two months, but returned the following year as a student in the Department of French Literature,...
Go to Profile#8874
Basil Willey
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Basil Willey, was British scholar of English literature and intellectual history. Having served in the British Army during the First World War, he rose to become King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1946 and President of Pembroke College from 1958 to until his retirement in 1964.
Go to Profile#8875
Gustav Suits
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Gustav Suits is considered one of the greatest Estonian poets. He was also an early leader of the literary movement group Noor-Eesti . Childhood and education Suits was born in the parish of Võnnu to teacher Hindrik Suits and Liis Suits . He had an older sister, Ann. In 1895, Suits moved to Tartu, Estonia to study at the Alexander Gymnasium. Suits so enjoyed this bustling university town and its intellectual centers that he became determined to become a part of its literary society. By the time he was 16 years old, the newspaper Uus Aeg published his first critical essay. In 1899, the newspa...
Go to Profile#8876
Meša Selimović
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Mehmed "Meša" Selimović was a Yugoslav writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.
Go to Profile#8877
Torquato Tasso
1544 - 1595 (51 years)
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1591 poem Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the Siege of Jerusalem of 1099.
Go to Profile#8878
Claudius Aelianus
200 - 235 (35 years)
Claudius Aelianus , commonly Aelian , born at Praeneste, was a Roman author and teacher of rhetoric who flourished under Septimius Severus and probably outlived Elagabalus, who died in 222. He spoke Greek so fluently that he was called "honey-tongued" ; Roman-born, he preferred Greek authors, and wrote in a slightly archaizing Greek himself.
Go to Profile#8879
Jack London
1876 - 1916 (40 years)
John Griffith Chaney , better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
Go to Profile#8880
Philip Larkin
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter . He came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows . He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 , and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse . His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Go to Profile#8881
Claudian
370 - 404 (34 years)
Claudius Claudianus, known in English as Claudian , was a Latin poet associated with the court of the Roman emperor Honorius at Mediolanum , and particularly with the general Stilicho. His work, written almost entirely in hexameters or elegiac couplets, falls into three main categories: poems for Honorius, poems for Stilicho, and mythological epic.
Go to Profile#8882
William Empson
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.
Go to Profile#8883
Rubén Darío
1867 - 1916 (49 years)
Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío , was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-language literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Darío had a great and lasting influence on 20th-century Spanish-language literature and journalism.
Go to Profile#8884
Richard Aldington
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Richard Aldington was an English writer and poet. He was an early associate of the Imagist movement. His 50-year writing career covered poetry, novels, criticism and biography. He edited The Egoist, a literary journal, and wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Criterion, and Poetry. His biography of Wellington won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Go to Profile#8885
James Russell Lowell
1819 - 1891 (72 years)
James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the fireside poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets that rivaled the popularity of British poets. These writers usually used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for families entertaining at their fireside.
Go to Profile#8886
Charlotte Brontë
1816 - 1855 (39 years)
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the gender neutral pen name Currer Bell. Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
Go to Profile#8887
Thomas De Quincey
1785 - 1859 (74 years)
Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English writer, essayist, and literary critic, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West.
Go to Profile#8888
Aulus Gellius
123 - 165 (42 years)
Aulus Gellius was a Roman author and grammarian, who was probably born and certainly brought up in Rome. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome. He is famous for his Attic Nights, a commonplace book, or compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of the works of many authors who might otherwise be unknown today.
Go to Profile#8889
Lawrence Durrell
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell. Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of eleven for his education. He did not like formal education, but started writing poetry at age 15. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23. In March 1935 he and his mother and younger siblings moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around the world.
Go to Profile#8890
Tristan Tzara
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco.
Go to Profile#8891
Rebecca West
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield , known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon , on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder , her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason , later The New Meaning of Treason , a study of th...
Go to Profile#8892
Paul de Man
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Paul de Man , born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approa...
Go to Profile#8893
Hippolyte Taine
1828 - 1893 (65 years)
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.
Go to Profile#8894
Lope de Vega
1562 - 1635 (73 years)
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio was a Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist who was a key figure in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature. In the literature of Spain, Lope de Vega is second to Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes said that Lope de Vega was “The Phoenix of Wits” and “Monster of Nature”
Go to Profile#8895
George Sand
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil , best known by her pen name George Sand , was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era, with more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
Go to Profile#8896
Tibullus
50 BC - 15 BC (35 years)
Albius Tibullus was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to him are of questionable origins. Little is known about the life of Tibullus. There are only a few references to him by later writers and a short Life of doubtful authority. Neither his praenomen nor his birthplace is known, and his gentile name has been questioned. His status was probably that of a Roman eques , and he had inherited a considerable estate. Like Virgil and Propertius, he seems to have lost most of it in 41 BC in the confiscations of Mark Antony...
Go to Profile#8897
Beatrix Potter
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was her first commercially published work in 1902. Her books, including 23 Tales, have sold more than 250 million copies. An entrepreneur, Potter was a pioneer of character merchandising. In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy, making him the oldest licensed character.
Go to Profile#8898
Anatole France
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
Go to Profile#8899
Valery Bryusov
1873 - 1924 (51 years)
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement. Background Valery Bryusov was born on 13 December 1873 into a merchant's family in Moscow. His parents were educated for their class and had some literary associations, but had little to do with his upbringing, leaving the boy largely to himself. He spent a great deal of time reading "everything that fell into [his] hands", including the works of Charles Darwin and Jules Verne, as well as various materialistic and scientific essays.
Go to Profile#8900
Eugenio Montale
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature. Life and works Early years Montale was born in Genoa. His family were chemical products traders . Montale was the youngest of six sons.
Go to Profile