The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8901
Arthur Ludwich
1840 - 1920 (80 years)
Arthur Ludwich was a German classical philologist who specialized in Homeric studies. He is remembered for his observations involving the metric and prosody of Homer. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Königsberg, where his instructors included Karl Lehrs and Ludwig Friedlander. In 1874–75 he conducted Homeric research in Italy, and during the following year, became an associate professor at the University of Breslau. In 1878 he succeeded Lehrs as professor of Greek philology at Königsberg.
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Josef Pekař
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Josef Pekař was a prominent Czech historian of the turn of 19th and 20th century, professor and rector of Charles University in Prague. Life and work After graduating at high school in Mladá Boleslav, which now bears his name, Pekař studied history in Prague. He started the career of historian already during studies, when his article, published in 1890 in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk's magazine Athenaeum, proved by historical findings, that so called "Manuscript of Králův Dvůr" , allegedly from the 13th century, whose authenticity has long led disputes in the Czech society, is a counterfeit. Pekař ...
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Victor Serge
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Victor Serge , born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich , was a Russian revolutionary Marxist, novelist, poet and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best remembered for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary and series of seven "witness-novels" chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century.
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Peter Paul Maria Alberdingk Thijm
1827 - 1904 (77 years)
Peter Paul Maria Alberdingk Thijm was a Dutch academic and writer. Life He made his studies in his home city, at first at the Gymnasium and later at the Athenaeum, from which he graduated in letters and history in 1857. For some years he was instructor in history in Maastricht. After being called to a professorship in the Catholic University of Leuven in 1870, he succeeded in establishing a chair for the special study of the history of the literature of the Netherlands.
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J. Dover Wilson
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
John Dover Wilson CH was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare. Born at Mortlake , he attended Lancing College, Sussex, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He taught at King's College London before becoming Regius Professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh.
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Ali-Shir Nava'i
1441 - 1501 (60 years)
'Ali-Shir Nava'i , also known as Nizām-al-Din ʿAli-Shir Herawī was a Timurid poet, writer, statesman, linguist, Hanafi Maturidi mystic and painter who was the greatest representative of Chagatai literature.
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Nicholas Moore
1918 - 1986 (68 years)
Nicholas Moore was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, whose reputation stood as high as Dylan Thomas’s. He later dropped out of the literary world. Biography Moore was born in Cambridge, England, the elder child of the philosopher G. E. Moore and Dorothy Ely. His paternal uncle was the poet, artist and critic Thomas Sturge Moore, his maternal grandfather was OUP editor and author George Herbert Ely and his brother was the composer Timothy Moore .
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William Whitehead
1715 - 1785 (70 years)
William Whitehead was an English poet and playwright. He became Poet Laureate in December 1757 after Thomas Gray declined the position. Life The son of a baker, Whitehead was born in Cambridge and through the patronage of Henry Bromley, afterwards Baron Montfort, was admitted to Winchester College aged fourteen.
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Bin Ueda
1874 - 1916 (42 years)
Bin Ueda was a Japanese writer. Born in Tsukiji, Tokyo, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. His major work is Kaichoon 海潮音 , a collection of translations from Western poets by Ueda himself.
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Robert Dwyer Joyce
1830 - 1883 (53 years)
Robert Dwyer Joyce was an Irish poet, writer, and collector of traditional Irish music. Life He was born in County Limerick, Ireland, where his parents, Garret and Elizabeth Joyce, lived in the northern foothills of the Ballyhoura Mountains, west of Ballyorgan. Robert had three brothers: Michael, John and Patrick, a noted scholar. The family claimed descent from one Seán Mór Seoighe , a stonemason from Connemara, County Galway.
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Charles, Duke of Orléans
1394 - 1465 (71 years)
Charles of Orléans was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans. He was also Duke of Valois, Count of Beaumont-sur-Oise and of Blois, Lord of Coucy, and the inheritor of Asti in Italy via his mother Valentina Visconti.
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Josep Romaguera
1642 - 1723 (81 years)
Josep Romaguera is the author of the only emblem book ever published in the Catalan language, the Atheneo de Grandesa. His work consists of prose, poetry and sermons. His writing is typical of Baroque style.
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Paul Friedländer
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Paul Friedländer was a German philologist specializing in classical literature. He studied under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff at the University of Berlin. In 1911 he became a Privatdozent and from 1914 Associate Professor in Berlin, becoming a Professor at Marburg University , University of Halle . In 1935, the Nazi regime forced him to resign and in 1938 he was detained in a concentration camp. After his release, he came to the United States, where he taught first at and Johns Hopkins University , as a lecturer and at UCLA .
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Paddy Chayefsky
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both adapted and original screenplays. He was one of the most renowned dramatists of the Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, dramatizing the lives of ordinary Americans. Martin Gottfried wrote in All His Jazz that Chayefsky was "the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism."
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Zhao Jingshen
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Zhao Jingshen was a popular Chinese novelist. Born in Lishui, Zhejiang, he was a member of the Seminar in literature. He also contributed to the field of translation and folk opera, and funded other writers.
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Archibald MacMechan
1862 - 1933 (71 years)
Archibald McKellar MacMechan was a Canadian academic at Dalhousie University and writer. His works deal mainly with Nova Scotia and its history. The Halifax Disaster was an official history of the Halifax Explosion.
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Johann Jakob Reiske
1716 - 1774 (58 years)
Johann Jakob Reiske was a German scholar and physician. He was a pioneer in the fields of Arabic and Byzantine philology as well as Islamic numismatics. Biography Reiske was born at Zörbig, in the Electorate of Saxony.
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Walther von der Vogelweide
1170 - 1230 (60 years)
Walther von der Vogelweide was a Minnesänger who composed and performed love-songs and political songs in Middle High German. Walther has been described as the greatest German lyrical poet before Goethe; his hundred or so love-songs are widely regarded as the pinnacle of Minnesang, the medieval German love lyric, and his innovations breathed new life into the tradition of courtly love. He was also the first political poet to write in German, with a considerable body of encomium, satire, invective, and moralising.
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Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
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Graham Hough
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Graham Goulden Hough was an English literary critic, poet, and Professor of English at Cambridge University from 1966 to 1975. Life Graham Hough was born in Great Crosby, Lancashire, the son of Joseph and Clara Hough. He was educated at Prescot Grammar School, the University of Liverpool, and Queens' College, Cambridge. He became a lecturer in English at Raffles College, Singapore, in 1930. In World War II he served as a volunteer with the Singapore Royal Artillery, until taken prisoner and interned in a Japanese prison-camp. After further travelling and teaching in the Far East, Hough returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Christ's College in 1950.
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Herman Grimm
1828 - 1901 (73 years)
Herman Grimm was a German academic and writer. Family and education Grimm's father was Wilhelm Grimm , and his uncle Jakob Grimm , the philologist compilers of indigenous folk tales . His other uncle was the painter engraver Ludwig Emil Grimm . Herman Grimm is believed to have had only one child at a young age, Martin Grimm. From 1841 Herman attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. He belonged to a clique associated with Bettina von Arnim , wife of the late poet Achim von Arnim , and started publishing drama and novels. He began legal and philological studies at the universitie...
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John Davies
1569 - 1626 (57 years)
Sir John Davies was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621. He became Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.
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Johann Friedrich Gronovius
1611 - 1671 (60 years)
Johann Friedrich Gronovius was a German classical scholar, librarian and critic. Born in Hamburg, he studied at several universities and travelled in England, France and Italy. In 1643, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, and in 1658 to the Greek chair at Leiden, where he remained until his death. In 1665, Gronovius succeeded Antonius Thysius the Younger as the 6th Librarian of Leiden University .
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Karl Elze
1821 - 1889 (68 years)
Karl Friedrich Elze was a German scholar and Shakespearean critic. Life He was the son of Pastor Karl August Wilhelm Elze. He studied classical philology, and modern, but especially English, literature at the University of Leipzig where he obtained his PhD. He was a master for a time in the gymnasium at Dessau, and in 1875 was appointed extraordinary, and in 1876 ordinary, professor of English philology at the University of Halle. The course catalogue for the winter 1875/76 has a four-hour lecture on the history of English literature one hour each day on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
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Otto Friedrich Gruppe
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Otto Friedrich Gruppe was a German philosopher, scholar-poet and philologist who served as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Poems by Gruppe were set to music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Karl Löwe, Elise Schmezer, and Franz Schreker. He rediscovered the cycle of Latin elegies by the Augustan poet Sulpicia and demonstrated their poetic value.
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Theophil Spoerri
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Theophil Spoerri , was a Swiss writer and academic. Family Theophil Spoerri was the son of a Methodist Preacher called Jakob Gottlieb Spoerri and of his wife Maria Eugenie Thiele/Spoerri. He had a cousin, also named Theophil Spörri who was a prominent Swiss Methodist theologian and with whom he is sometimes confused.
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Veronica Forrest-Thomson
1947 - 1975 (28 years)
Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016. Life and education Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.
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Josephine Johnson
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Josephine Winslow Johnson was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. To this day she's the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O.
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Mary Augusta Scott
1851 - 1918 (67 years)
Mary Augusta Scott was a scholar and professor of English at Smith College. She was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Yale University, in 1894. Biography Scott was born in Dayton, Ohio, and received her master's degree at Vassar College. She studied at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University; she earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1894.
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John Davenport
1908 - 1966 (58 years)
John Lancelot Agard Bramhall Davenport was an English critic and book reviewer who wrote for, amongst other publications, The Observer and The Spectator. He was a mentor to the critic Nora Sayre. Life The son of Robert Davenport , a self-described "dramatic author", writer and illustrator of children's stories, and writer of lyrics for popular songs and the actress Muriel George , Davenport was primarily raised at Barons Court by his grandmother, and subsequently educated at St Paul's and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at which latter he opted to study rather than taking up a history scholarship he had won to Hertford College, Oxford.
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Robert Finch
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Robert Duer Claydon Finch was a Canadian poet and academic. He twice won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry. Life Born in Freeport, Long Island, New York, Finch was educated at the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne. He was a professor of French at the University of Toronto for four decades , and an expert on French poetry.
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Jacqueline Susann
1918 - 1974 (56 years)
Jacqueline Susann was an American novelist and actress. Her iconic novel, Valley of the Dolls , is one of the best-selling books in publishing history. With her two subsequent works, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough , Susann became the first author to have three novels top The New York Times Best Seller list consecutively.
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Karl Friedrich Heinrich
1774 - 1838 (64 years)
Karl Friedrich Heinrich was a German classical philologist. He studied under Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs and Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso at the gymnasium in Gotha. From 1791 he studied theology at the University of Göttingen, where under the influence of Christian Gottlob Heyne, he changed his focus to philology. In 1804 he became a professor of Greek literature at the University of Kiel, then in 1818 relocated to the University of Bonn as a professor of classical philology. At Bonn, he served as director of the philological seminar.
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Marvin Mudrick
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Marvin Mudrick taught at UC Santa Barbara from 1949 until his death in October 1986. He created the university's College of Creative Studies in 1967 and was its provost until forced out by Chancellor Robert Huttenback in 1984. He wrote 100 essays on books for The Hudson Review and published five collections of his essays on books and writers. He also wrote for The New York Review of Books and Harper's.
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John Richardson
1796 - 1852 (56 years)
John Richardson was a Canadian officer in the British Army who became the first Canadian-born novelist to achieve international recognition. Life Richardson was born at Fort George or in Queenston on the Niagara River in 1796. His mother Madelaine was the daughter of the fur trader John Askin and an Odawa woman Monette. His father, Dr. Robert Richardson, was a surgeon with the Queen's Rangers. As a young boy, Richardson lived for a time with his grandparents in Detroit and later with his parents at Fort Malden, Amherstburg. His step-mother, Marie Archange Barthe, told him of stories about ea...
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Medea Norsa
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Medea Vittoria Irma Norsa was an Italian papyrologist and philologist. She headed the Istituto Papirologico Girolamo Vitelli in Florence from 1935 to 1949. Early life and education Norsa was born to Michele Norsa and Silvia Vittoria Krosna in Trieste on 26 August 1877, the oldest of four children. She was christened Medea Vittoria Irma on 16 September 1877. After Silvia's death in 1886, her father married Caterina Giovanna Furlani in 1894 and had three more children.
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Herman J. Mankiewicz
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter who, with Orson Welles, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane . Both Mankiewicz and Welles would go on to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film. He was previously a Berlin correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, assistant theater editor at The New York Times, and the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. Alexander Woollcott said that Mankiewicz was the "funniest man in New York".
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Arthur Johnston
1579 - 1641 (62 years)
Arthur Johnston was a Scottish poet and physician. He was born in Caskieben near Inverurie in Aberdeenshire. His father, Sir George Johnston, was an Aberdeenshire laird, and his mother Christian Forbes was the daughter of Lord Forbes.
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Ivan Chemnitzer
1745 - 1784 (39 years)
Ivan Ivanovitch Chemnitzer or Khemnitzer was a Russian fabulist, born at Yenotayevsk, Astrakhan Governorate, the son of a German physician of Chemnitz, who had served in the Russian army under Peter the Great. He participated in the campaigns of the Seven Years' War and afterward devoted himself to mining engineering and subsequently visited Germany, Holland, and France. Upon his return he accepted a position as Consul to Smyrna, where an attack of melancholia hastened his death.
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Dorothy Fields
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Dorothy Fields was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicalss and films. Her best-known pieces include "The Way You Look Tonight" , "A Fine Romance" , "On the Sunny Side of the Street" , "Don't Blame Me" , "Pick Yourself Up" , "I'm in the Mood for Love" , "You Couldn't Be Cuter" and "Big Spender" . Throughout her career, she collaborated with various influential figures in the American musical theater, including Jerome Kern, Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin, and Jimmy McHugh. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one o...
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Friedrich August Grotefend
1798 - 1836 (38 years)
Friedrich August Grotefend was a German philologist. Grotefend was a relative of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, who deciphered the cuneiform writing. Biography Grotefend studied theology and philology at the University of Göttingen, and afterwards was a teacher at the Pädagogium in Ilefeld . In 1831 he was appointed director of the gymnasium in Göttingen. In 1835 he received an associate professorship at the University of Göttingen, however he died soon afterwards on 28 February 1836.
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Catherine Winkworth
1827 - 1878 (51 years)
Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh in colonial India.
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Su Shi
1037 - 1101 (64 years)
Su Shi , courtesy name Zizhan , art name Dongpo , was a Chinese calligrapher, essayist, gastronomer, pharmacologist, poet, politician, and travel writer who lived during the Song dynasty. A major personality of the Song era, at times holding high-level political positions, Su was also an important figure in Song Dynasty politics, aligning himself with Sima Guang and others, against the New Policy party led by Wang Anshi, gaining some level of popular support through his actions, and also sometimes experiencing politically motivated reversals to his government career.
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Marc Blitzstein
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein , was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed trans...
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Harry Bloom
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Harry Saul Bloom was a South African journalist, novelist, activist and lecturer. Early life and career Solomon Harris Bloom was born into a Jewish South African family. He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining his law degree in 1937. He subsequently became an advocate in Johannesburg. In 1940, he married Beryl Cynthia Gordon, after knowing her three weeks, and they moved to London, living in Old Compton Street during the Blitz. Writing under the pseudonyms Walter and Beryl Storm , they worked as war correspondents during the Second World War, and covered the Nurember...
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George Derwent Thomson
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
George Derwent Thomson was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language. Classical scholar Thomson studied Classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he attained First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. At TCD he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at University College Galway.
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Friedrich Müller
1834 - 1898 (64 years)
Friedrich Müller was an Austrian linguist and ethnologist who originated the term Hamito-Semitic languages for what are now called the Afro-Asiatic languages. Biography He studied at the University of Göttingen. His studies were completed at the University of Vienna , where he was librarian from 1858 to 1866, and then became extraordinary and then ordinary professor of comparative philology and Sanskrit. He was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and was one of the highest authorities on comparative philology and ethnology and the relations of the two sciences, being so regarded in...
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John Hudson
1662 - 1719 (57 years)
John Hudson , English classical scholar, was born at Wythop, near Cockermouth in Cumberland. He was educated at The Queen's College, Oxford, and spent the rest of his life at the University: appointed as a Fellow of University College, Oxford in 1686, Bodley's librarian in 1701, and in 1711 principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford. His political views stood in the way of his preferment in the church and university.
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Nikolai Stankevich
1813 - 1840 (27 years)
Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich was a Russian public figure, philosopher, and poet. Biography Nikolay Stankevich was born in Uderevka, Voronezh Governorate, and in 1834 graduated from the Moscow State University, where he was influenced by Professor Mikhail Kachenovsky and followers of the so-called "skeptical school" in historiography. By late 1831, Stankevich had organized a literary and philosophical society called the Circle of Stankevich. He had been under police surveillance since 1833 due to his connections with a group of oppositionary university students led by Ya.I. Kostenetsky. I...
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Gottlieb Christoph Harless
1738 - 1815 (77 years)
Gottlieb Christoph Harless was a German classical scholar and bibliographer. Biography He was born at Culmbach in Bavaria. He studied at the universities of Halle, Erlangen and Jena. In 1765 he was appointed professor of oriental languages and eloquence at the Gymnasium Casimirianum in Coburg, in 1770 professor of poetry and eloquence at Erlangen, and in 1776 librarian of the university. He held his professorship for forty-five years until his death.
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