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,
#9001
Alexandre Dumas fils
1824 - 1895 (71 years)
Alexandre Dumas was a French author and playwright, best known for the romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias , published in 1848, which was adapted into Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata , as well as numerous stage and film productions, usually titled Camille in English-language versions.
Go to Profile#9002
Franz Rolf Schröder
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Franz Rolf Schröder , often referred to as F. R. Schröder, was a German philologist who was Professor and Chair of German Philology at the University of Würzburg. He specialized in the study German and early Germanic literature, and Germanic and Indo-European religion. He was for many decades editor of the .
Go to Profile#9003
Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea...
Go to Profile#9004
Anthony Boucher
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
William Anthony Parker White , better known by his pen name Anthony Boucher , was an American author, critic, and editor who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dramas. Between 1942 and 1947, he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to "Anthony Boucher", White also employed the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes", which was the pseudonym of a late-19th-century American serial killer; Boucher would also write light verse and sign it "Herman W. Mudgett" .
Go to Profile#9005
Liu Yuxi
772 - 842 (70 years)
Liu Yuxi was a Chinese essayist, philosopher, and poet active during the Tang dynasty. Biography Family background and education His ancestors were Xiongnu nomadic people. The putative ‘seventh generation’ family head, Liu Liang, was an official of the Northern Wei , who followed the Emperor Xiaowen when he established the capital at Luoyang in 494. Following the government sinification policy, he became Han and register his surname as Liu. From then on the family was based in Luoyang.
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Fredrik Böök
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Martin Fredrik Böök was a Swedish professor of literary history at Lund University, literary critic and writer. He wrote biographies and books on Swedish literature. Biography Fredrik Böök became a philosophy graduate at Lund University in 1903, a philosophy licentiate and an associate professor of literary history in 1907 and a philosophy doctor in 1908. In 1920 he became professor of literary history at Lund University.
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Nevil Shute
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers or from fellow engineers that he was "not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.
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Francesco Redi
1626 - 1699 (73 years)
Francesco Redi was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist, and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology", and as the "father of modern parasitology". He was the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.
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John Drinkwater
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
John Drinkwater was an English poet and dramatist. He was known before World War I as one of the Dymock poets, and his poetry was included in all five volumes of Georgian Poetry . After World War I, he achieved fame as a playwright and became closely associated with Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
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Alcée Fortier
1856 - 1914 (58 years)
Alcée Fortier was a renowned Professor of Romance Languages at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the late 19th and early 20th century, he published numerous works on language, literature, Louisiana history and folklore, Louisiana Creole languages, and personal reminiscence. He had French Creole ancestry dating to the colonial period.
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Christian Karl Reisig
1792 - 1829 (37 years)
Christian Karl Reisig was a German philologist and linguist who was a native of Weißensee. Reisig studied philology under Gottfried Hermann at the University of Leipzig, afterwards furthering his studies at Göttingen . From 1813 to 1815 he was a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, afterwards working as a lecturer at the University of Jena. In 1820 he relocated to the University of Halle as an associate professor, where in 1824 he became a full professor. Two of his better known students were Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl and Friedrich Haase , the latter having published an edition of Reisig's Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft in 1839.
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Abraham Goldfaden
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Abraham Goldfaden , also known as Avram Goldfaden, was a Russian-born Jewish poet, playwright, stage director and actor in Yiddish and Hebrew languages and author of some 40 plays. Goldfaden is considered the father of modern Jewish theatre.
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Ton Satomi
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
is the pen-name of Japanese author Hideo Yamanouchi. Satomi was known for the craftsmanship of his dialogue and command of the Japanese language. His two elder brothers, Ikuma Arishima and Takeo Arishima, were also authors.
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Joseph Ritson
1752 - 1803 (51 years)
Joseph Ritson was an English antiquary who is well known for editing the first scholarly collection of Robin Hood ballads . After a visit to France in 1791, he became a staunch supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution. He was also an influential vegetarianism activist. He is also known for his collections of English nursery rhymes, such as "Roses Are Red" and "Little Bo-Peep", in Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus, published in London by Joseph Johnson.
Go to Profile#9015
Martin Schanz
1842 - 1914 (72 years)
Martin Schanz was a German classicist and Plato scholar. He was a Dozent and Professor at the University of Würzburg from 1867 to 1912, and is especially known for his history of Roman literature and his ground-breaking, critical edition of Plato's dialogues.
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John Home
1722 - 1808 (86 years)
Rev John Home was a Scottish minister, soldier and author. His play Douglas was a standard Scottish school text until the Second World War, but his work is now largely neglected. In 1783, he was one of the joint founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Theodore Prodromos
1115 - 1160 (45 years)
Theodore Prodromos or Prodromus , probably also the same person as the so-called Ptochoprodromos , was a Byzantine Greek writer, well known for his prose and poetry. Biography Very little is known about his life. Further developing a genre begun by Nicholas Kallikles, he wrote many occasional poems for a widespread circle of patrons at the Byzantine court. Some of the literary pieces attributed to him are unpublished, while still others may be wrongly attributed to him. Even so, there does emerge from these writings the figure of an author in reduced circumstances, with a marked inclination to...
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William Rowley
1585 - 1626 (41 years)
William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626 in the graveyard of St James's, Clerkenwell in north London.
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Henry Arthur Jones
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Henry Arthur Jones was an English dramatist, who was first noted for his melodrama The Silver King , and went on to write prolifically, often appearing to mirror Ibsen from the opposite viewpoint. As a right-winger, he engaged in extensive debates with left-wing writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
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Charles Mackay
1814 - 1889 (75 years)
Charles Mackay was a Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter, remembered mainly for his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Early life Charles Mackay was born in Perth. His father, George Mackay, was a bombardier in the Royal Artillery, and his mother Amelia Cargill died shortly after his birth.
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Manuel Milà i Fontanals
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Manuel Milà i Fontanals was a Spanish scholar. He was born at Vilafranca del Penedès, near Barcelona, and was educated first in Barcelona, and afterwards at the University of Cervera. In 1845, he became professor of literature at the University of Barcelona, and held this post until his death at Vilafranca del Penedès on the July 16, 1884. The type of the scholarly recluse, Milà i Fontanals was almost unknown outside the walls of the university until 1859, when he was appointed president of the jocs florals at Barcelona.
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Ellen Glasgow
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim. A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
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Johannes Vahlen
1830 - 1911 (81 years)
Johannes Vahlen was a German classical philologist. He was the father of mathematician Theodor Vahlen . In 1852 he graduated at the University of Bonn, where he studied classical philology. In 1856 he became an associate professor at the University of Breslau, and in 1858 a full professor at the University of Freiburg. Shortly afterwards, he relocated to Vienna, and in 1862 became a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. From 1874 onward, he taught classes as a professor of classical philology at the University of Berlin. He was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#9024
Arsène Darmesteter
1846 - 1888 (42 years)
Arsène Darmesteter was a distinguished French philologist and man of letters. Biography He studied under Gaston Paris at the École pratique des hautes études, and became professor of Old French language and literature at the Sorbonne, where he met his wife, the painter Héléna Hartog. His Life of Words appeared in English in 1888. He also collaborated with Adolphe Hatzfeld in a Dictionnaire général de la langue française . Among his most important work was the elucidation of Old French by means of the many glosseses in the medieval writings of Rashi and other French Jews.
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Marc Monnier
1827 - 1885 (58 years)
Marc Monnier was a Swiss writer. Life Monnier was born at Florence. His father was French, and his mother a Genevese; he received his early education in Naples, he then studied in Paris and Geneva, and he completed his education at Heidelberg and Berlin. He became professor of comparative literature at Geneva, and eventually vice-rector of the university. He died at Geneva on April 18, 1885.
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Liviu Rebreanu
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Liviu Rebreanu was a Romanian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and journalist. Life Born in Felsőilosva , then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, he was the second of thirteen children born to Vasile Rebreanu, a schoolteacher, and Ludovica Diuganu, descendants of peasants. His father had been a classmate of George Coșbuc's and was an amateur folklorist. Liviu Rebreanu went to primary school in Major , where he was taught by his father, and then in Naszód and Beszterce , to military school at Sopron and then to the Ludovica Military Academy in Budapest. He worked as an ...
Go to Profile#9027
Thomas Moore
1779 - 1852 (73 years)
Thomas Moore , also known as Tom Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
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Isaac Rosenberg
1890 - 1918 (28 years)
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist. His Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War. Early life Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 at 5 Adelaide Place near St. Mary Redcliffe. He was the second of six children and the eldest son of his parents, Barnett and Hacha Rosenberg, who were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Britain from Dvinsk . In 1897, the family moved to Stepney, a poor district of the East End of London, and one with a large Jewish community. Isaac Rosenberg attended St. Paul's Primary School at Wellclose Square, St George in the East parish.
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Antonin Artaud
1896 - 1948 (52 years)
Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud , was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. In particular, he had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.
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Masamune Atsuo
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Masamune Atsuo was a researcher of Japanese literature and a poet. Biography Masamune Atsuo was born in Wake District Honami , Okayama Prefecture, he was the younger brother of novelist and literary critic Masamune Hakuchō. While his brother moved to Tokyo to work, Atsuo remained home and ran the family business. He studied waka under the guidance of Inoue Michiyasu, and was friends with Shimaki Akahiko and Saitō Mokichi. In addition to work, he wrote waka and researched Japanese literature. Due to his achievements, in 1952 he became a professor at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama.
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Justus Lipsius
1547 - 1606 (59 years)
Justus Lipsius was a Flemish Catholic philologist, philosopher, and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia . His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden, and Leuven.
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John Trumbull
1750 - 1831 (81 years)
John Trumbull was an American poet. Biography Trumbull was born in what is now Watertown, Connecticut, where his father was a Congregational preacher. At the age of seven he passed his entrance examinations at Yale University, but did not enter until 1763; he graduated in 1767, studied law there, and in 1771–1773 was a tutor .
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Adelaide Crapsey
1878 - 1914 (36 years)
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Rochester, New York. Her parents were the businesswoman Adelaide T. Crapsey and the Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who moved from New York City to Rochester.
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Charles Williams
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was born, but in 1939 he moved to Oxford with the university press for which he worked and was buried there following his early death.
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Johan Ihre
1707 - 1780 (73 years)
Johan Ihre was a Swedish philologist and historical linguist. Life Ihre was born in Lund, son of the theologian Thomas Ihre and his spouse Brita Steuchia. After his father's death in 1720, Johan Ihre was raised in the house of his grandfather Archbishop Mattias Stechius in Uppsala, and studied at Uppsala University, where he completed his magister degree in 1730. In 1730-1733 he studied abroad, in Oxford, London and Paris. He was in 1734 appointed docent in Uppsala, 1735 librarian at the University Library, and was from 1737 until his death holder of the Skyttean professorship in Eloquence and Government.
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Alice Dalgliesh
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
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Walter of Châtillon
1135 - 1201 (66 years)
Walter of Châtillon was a 12th-century French writer and theologian who wrote in the Latin language. He studied under Stephen of Beauvais and at the University of Paris. It was probably during his student years that he wrote a number of Latin poems in the Goliardic manner that found their way into the Carmina Burana collection. During his lifetime, however, he was more esteemed for a long Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great, the Alexandreis, sive Gesta Alexandri Magni, a hexameter epic, full of anachronisms; he depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus as having already taken place during the days of Alexander the Great.
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Jacques Delille
1738 - 1813 (75 years)
Jacques Delille was a French poet who came to national prominence with his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and made an international reputation with his didactic poem on gardening. He barely survived the slaughter of the French Revolution and lived for some years outside France, including three years in England. The poems on abstract themes that he published after his return were less well received.
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Johannes R. Becher
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Johannes Robert Becher was a German politician, novelist, and poet. He was affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany before World War II. At one time, he was part of the literary avant-garde, writing in an expressionist style.
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Thomas Bell
1792 - 1880 (88 years)
Thomas Hornsey Bell FRS FLS was an English zoologist, dental surgeon and writer, born in Poole, Dorset, England. Career Bell, like his mother Susan, took a keen interest in natural history which his mother also encouraged in his younger cousin Philip Henry Gosse. Bell left Poole in 1813 for his training as a dental surgeon in London. He is listed in 1817 as having an address at number 17 Fenchurch Street, and as being a committee member of the newly formed London Peace Society. By 1819 his address is given as 18 Bucklersbury, also in the city of London. He combined two careers, becoming Professor of Zoology at King's College London in 1836 and lecturing on anatomy at Guy's Hospital.
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Marian Engel
1933 - 1985 (52 years)
Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear , a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.
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Ch'ien Mu
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Ch'ien Mu or Qian Mu was a Chinese historian, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the greatest historians and philosophers of 20th-century China. Ch'ien, together with Lü Simian, Chen Yinke and Chen Yuan, was known as the "Four Greatest Historians" of Modern China .
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John Richardson
1787 - 1865 (78 years)
Sir John Richardson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naval surgeon, naturalist and Arctic explorer. Life Richardson was born at Nith Place in Dumfries the son of Gabriel Richardson, Provost of Dumfries, and his wife, Anne Mundell. He was educated at Dumfries Grammar School. He was then apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Dr James Mundell, a surgeon in Dumfries.
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Owen Dodson
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Owen Vincent Dodson was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. He was one of the leading African-American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets following the Harlem Renaissance. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation for a series of one-act plays.
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Liang Shih-chiu
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Liang Shih-chiu , also romanized as Liang Shiqiu, and also known as Liang Chih-hwa , was a renowned educator, writer, translator, literary theorist and lexicographer. Biography Liang was born in Beijing in 1903. His father, Liang Xianxi , was a xiucai in the Qing dynasty. He was educated at Tsinghua College in Beijing from 1915 to 1923. He went on to study at Colorado College and later pursued his graduate studies at Harvard and Columbia Universities. At Harvard, he studied literary criticism under Irving Babbitt, whose New Humanism helped shape his conservative literary tenets.
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Royall Tyler
1757 - 1826 (69 years)
Royall Tyler was an American jurist and playwright. He was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard University in 1776, and then served in the Massachusetts militia during the American Revolution. He was admitted to the bar in 1780, became a lawyer, and fathered eleven children. In 1801, he was appointed a Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. He wrote a play, The Contrast, which was produced in 1787 in New York City, shortly after George Washington's inauguration. It is considered the first American comedy. Washington attended the production, which was well-received, and Tyler became a li...
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Kit Pedler
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Christopher Magnus Howard "Kit" Pedler was a British medical scientist, parapsychologist and science fiction author. Biography He was the head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London, where he published a number of papers. Pedler's first television contribution was for the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
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Vicente Medina
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Vicente Tomás Medina was a Spanish poet, dramatist and editor, and a symbol of local identity for the Murcia region of southeastern Spain. His best-known work, Aires murcianos , was taken up as a reference point for local cultural and social criticism, and was widely praised by contemporaries. In his time Medina was considered in Spain to be one of the country's most important writers, referred to as "the great contemporary Spanish poet" and "the Spanish poet of poets". His fame has since declined, and he is now little read; but he remains an important figure as the greatest poet to have writ...
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Thomas McGrath
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Thomas Matthew McGrath, was a celebrated American poet and screenwriter of documentary films. McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. He served in the Aleutian Islands with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford. McGrath also pursued postgraduate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He taught at Colby College in Maine and at Los Angeles State College, from which he was dismissed in connection with his appearance, as an unfriendly witness, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953.
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Nakamura Kusatao
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Nakamura Kusatao was a Japanese haiku poet. Nakamura was born on July 27, 1901, in Amoy, Fujian Province, China, the son of a Japanese diplomat. A few years later his mother brought him to Japan, where he was educated in various schools in Matsuyama and Tokyo. One of those schools was Seinan Elementary School in Tokyo. When returning to that school twenty years later, he wrote perhaps his most famous haiku, reflecting on the falling snow and the passing of the Meiji era:In 1977, the haiku was inscribed on a stone monument at the school unveiled by Nakamura. In 1925, he attended Tokyo Univer...
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