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
Vittorio Alfieri
1749 - 1803 (54 years)
Count Vittorio Alfieri was an Italian dramatist and poet, considered the "founder of Italian tragedy." He wrote nineteen tragedies, sonnets, satires, and a notable autobiography. Early life Alfieri was born at Asti, Kingdom of Sardinia, now in Piedmont.
Go to Profile#9002
Patrick White
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Patrick Victor Martindale White was a British-born Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and stream of consciousness techniques. In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation, the only Australian to have been awarded the prize. White was also the inaugural recipient of the Miles Franklin Award...
Go to Profile#9003
Kalhana
Kalhana was the author of Rajatarangini , an account of the history of Kashmir. He wrote the work in Sanskrit between 1148 and 1149. All information regarding his life has to be deduced from his own writing, a major scholar of which is Mark Aurel Stein.
Go to Profile#9004
Edith Sitwell
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
Go to Profile#9005
Jean Giraudoux
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. Giraudoux's dominant theme is the relationship between man and woman—or in some cases, between man and some unattainable ideal.
Go to Profile#9006
John Cowper Powys
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance , Weymouth Sands , and Maiden Castle have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography.
Go to Profile#9007
Titu Maiorescu
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century.
Go to Profile#9008
Alexander Afanasyev
1826 - 1871 (45 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk taless, one of the largest collections of folklore in the world. This collection was not strictly Russian, but included folk tales from Ukraine and Belarus alongside Russian folk tales. The first edition of his collection was published in eight volumes from 1855 to 1867, earning him the reputation of being the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm.
Go to Profile#9009
William Congreve
1670 - 1729 (59 years)
William Congreve was an English playwright, poet and Whig politician. His works, which form an important component of Restoration literature, were known for their use of satire and the comedy of manners genre. Notable plays he wrote include The Old Bachelor , The Double Dealer , Love for Love , The Mourning Bride and The Way of the World . Dying in London, Congreve was buried at the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Go to Profile#9010
Alfonso Reyes
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Alfonso Reyes Ochoa was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and has been acclaimed as one of the greatest authors in Spanish language. He served as ambassador of Mexico to Argentina and Brazil.
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Jules Laforgue
1860 - 1887 (27 years)
Jules Laforgue was a Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist". Laforgue was a model for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, including for Renoir's 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Go to Profile#9012
Charles Olson
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Go to Profile#9013
Bennett Cerf
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Bennett Alfred Cerf was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for over 17 years on the panel game show What's My Line?
Go to Profile#9014
Eugen Lovinescu
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Eugen Lovinescu was a Romanian modernist literary historian, literary critic, academic, and novelist, who in 1919 established the Sburătorul literary club. He was the father of Monica Lovinescu, and the uncle of , , and Anton Holban. He was elected to the Romanian Academy posthumously, in 1991.
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Nelly Sachs
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Nelly Sachs was a German–Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is ; other works include the poems "" , "" , and the collections of poetry , , , and . She was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Go to Profile#9016
Zelda Fitzgerald
1900 - 1948 (48 years)
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage.
Go to Profile#9017
Garcilaso de la Vega
1503 - 1536 (33 years)
Garcilaso de la Vega, KOS was a Spanish soldier and poet. Although not the first or the only one to do so, he was the most influential poet to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms, poetic techniques, and themes to Spain. He was well known in poetic circles during his lifetime, and his poetry has continued to be popular without interruption until the present. His poetry was published posthumously by Juan Boscán in 1543, and it has been the subject of several annotated editions, the first and most famous of which appeared in 1574.
Go to Profile#9018
Andrei Bely
1880 - 1934 (54 years)
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely , was a Russian novelist, Symbolist poet, theorist and literary critic. He was a committed anthroposophist and follower of Rudolf Steiner. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the third-greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. The Andrei Bely Prize , one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. His poems were set to music and performed by Russian singer-songwriters.
Go to Profile#9019
Marie de France
1101 - 1300 (199 years)
Marie de France was a poet, possibly born in what is now France, who lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an unknown court, but she and her work were almost certainly known at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts. However, one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse.
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Frank Wedekind
1864 - 1918 (54 years)
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes , is considered to anticipate expressionism and was influential in the development of epic theatre.
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Basil Bunting
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist tradition in English. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud: he was an accomplished reader of his own work.
Go to Profile#9022
Nikolay Karamzin
1766 - 1826 (60 years)
Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin was a Russian historian, romantic writer, poet and critic. He is best remembered for his fundamental History of the Russian State, a 12-volume national history. Early life Karamzin was born in the small village of Mikhailovka near Simbirsk in the Znamenskoye family estate. Another version exists that he was born in 1765 in the Mikhailovka village of the Orenburg Governorate where his father served, and in recent years Orenburg historians have been actively disputing the official version. His father Mikhail Yegorovich Karamzin was a retired Kapitan of the Imper...
Go to Profile#9023
Alcaeus of Mytilene
630 BC - 560 BC (70 years)
Alcaeus of Mytilene was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was a contemporary of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.
Go to Profile#9024
William Caxton
1422 - 1491 (69 years)
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.
Go to Profile#9025
Muhammad Iqbal
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Sir Muhammad Iqbal , was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is considered among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan. He is commonly referred to by the honorific Allama .
Go to Profile#9026
Compton Mackenzie
1883 - 1972 (89 years)
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Hugh MacDiarmid, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was knighted in 1952.
Go to Profile#9027
Bertha von Suttner
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was an Austro-Bohemian noblewoman, pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate , the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian laureate.
Go to Profile#9028
Pedro Salinas
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Pedro Salinas y Serrano was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic. In 1937, he delivered the Turnbull lectures at Johns Hopkins University. These were later published under the title Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry.
Go to Profile#9029
Anacreon
570 BC - 485 BC (85 years)
Anacreon was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and erotic poems. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets. Anacreon wrote all of his poetry in the ancient Ionic dialect. Like all early lyric poetry, it was composed to be sung or recited to the accompaniment of music, usually the lyre. Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals and the observations of everyday people and life.
Go to Profile#9030
France Prešeren
1800 - 1849 (49 years)
France Prešeren was a 19th-century Romantic Slovene poet whose poems have been translated into many languages. He has been considered the greatest Slovene classical poet and has inspired later Slovene literature. He wrote the first Slovene ballad and the first Slovene epic. After his death, he became the leading name of the Slovene literary canon.
Go to Profile#9031
Kumaran Asan
1873 - 1924 (51 years)
Mahakavi Kumaran Asan was a poet of Malayalam literature, Indian social reformer and a philosopher.He is known to have initiated a revolution in Malayalam poetry during the first quarter of the 20th century, transforming it from the metaphysical to the lyrical and his poetry is characterised by its moral and spiritual content, poetic concentration and dramatic contextualisation. He is one of the triumvirate poets of Kerala and a disciple of Sree Narayana Guru. He was awarded the prefix "Mahakavi" in 1922 by the Madras university which means "great poet".
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Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
1892 - 1927 (35 years)
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, art name Chōkōdō Shujin, was a Japanese writer active in the Taishō period in Japan. He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. He took his own life at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital.
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Daniil Kharms
1905 - 1942 (37 years)
Daniil Ivanovich Kharms was an early Soviet-era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Early years Kharms was born as Daniil Yuvachev in St. Petersburg, into the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a member of the revolutionary group The People's Will. By the time of his son's birth, Ivan Yuvachev had already been imprisoned for his involvement in subversive acts against Tsar Alexander III and had become a philosopher.
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Yu Dafu
1896 - 1945 (49 years)
Yu Wen, better known by his courtesy name Yu Dafu was a modern Chinese short story writer and poet. He was one of the new literary group initiators, and this new literary group was named the Creation Society. His literary masterpieces include Chenlun , Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang , Guoqu , Chuben and so on. Yu Dafu's literary works' writing style and main themes profoundly influenced a group of young writers and formed a spectacular romantic trend in Chinese literature in the 1920s and 1930s. He died in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies, likely executed.
Go to Profile#9035
Joris-Karl Huysmans
1848 - 1907 (59 years)
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours . He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.
Go to Profile#9036
Alessandro Manzoni
1785 - 1873 (88 years)
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni was an Italian poet, novelist and philosopher. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed , generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Manzoni also contributed to the stabilization of the modern Italian language and helped to ensure linguistic unity throughout Italy. He was an influential proponent of Liberal Catholicism in Italy. His work and t...
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John Webster
1578 - 1634 (56 years)
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped with Shakespeare's.
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Aristophanes
448 BC - 386 BC (62 years)
Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion , was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
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George Saintsbury
1845 - 1933 (88 years)
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA , was an English critic, literary historian, editor, teacher, and wine connoisseur. He is regarded as a highly influential critic of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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Joel Chandler Harris
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.
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Mikhail Sholokhov
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov was a Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don.
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Attar of Nishapur
1145 - 1230 (85 years)
Abū Ḥāmid bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm , better known by his pen-names Farīd ud-Dīn and ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur , was an Iranian poet, theoretician of Sufism, and hagiographer from Nishapur who had an immense and lasting influence on Persian poetry and Sufism. He wrote a collection of lyrical poems and number of long poems in the philosophical tradition of Islamic mysticism, as well as a prose work with biographies and sayings of famous Muslim mystics. The Conference of the Birds, The Book of Divine, and Memorial of the Saints are among his best known works.
Go to Profile#9043
Wilhelm Grimm
1786 - 1859 (73 years)
Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author and anthropologist. He was the younger brother of Jacob Grimm, of the literary duo the Brothers Grimm. Life and work Wilhelm was born in February 1786 in Hanau, in Hesse-Kassel. In 1803, he started studying law at the University of Marburg, one year after his brother Jacob started there. The two brothers spent their entire lives close together. In their school days, they had one bed and one table in common; as students, they had two beds and two tables in the same room. They always lived under one roof and had their books and property in common. In 182...
Go to Profile#9044
Pierre Louÿs
1870 - 1925 (55 years)
Pierre-Félix Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.
Go to Profile#9045
Amy Lowell
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Life Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, th...
Go to Profile#9046
Hugh Walpole
1884 - 1941 (57 years)
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death.
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Pierre Reverdy
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Pierre Reverdy was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing "-isms", searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: "the sublime simplicity of reality."
Go to Profile#9048
Pablo Neruda
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair .
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Robinson Jeffers
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet known for his work about the central California coast. Much of Jeffers' poetry was written in narrative and epic form. However, he is also known for his shorter verse and is considered an icon of the environmental movement.
Go to Profile#9050
Robert Desnos
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement. Biography Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. He also worked as an amanuensis for journalist Jean de Bonnefon. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
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