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,
#9101
John D. MacDonald
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
John Dann MacDonald was an American writer of novels and short stories. He is known for his thrillers. MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many set in his adopted home of Florida. One of the most successful American novelists of his time, MacDonald sold an estimated 70 million books. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series and his 1957 novel The Executioners, which was filmed as Cape Fear and remade in 1991.
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František Čelakovský
1799 - 1852 (53 years)
František Ladislav Čelakovský was a Czech poet, translator, linguist, and literary critic. He was a major figure in the Czech "national revival". His most notable works are Ohlas písní ruských and Ohlas písní českých .
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Giorgos Seferis
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Giorgos or George Seferis , the pen name of Georgios Seferiadis , was a Greek poet and diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.
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Carl Zuckmayer
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Carl Zuckmayer was a German writer and playwright. His older brother was the pedagogue, composer, conductor, and pianist Eduard Zuckmayer. His first two dramas were failures. In 1929, he wrote the script for the movie Der blaue Engel, for which he received the Georg Büchner Prize. He also wrote plays, including The Captain of Köpenick , Des Teufels General , Barbara Blomberg. Ein Stück in drei Akten , andKranichtanz. Ein Akt .
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Alfred de Vigny
1797 - 1863 (66 years)
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare. Biography Vigny was born in Loches to an aristocratic family. His father was a 60-year-old veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20th birthday; his mother, 20 years younger, was a strong-willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took personal responsibility for Vigny's early education. His maternal grandfather, the Marquis de Baraudin, had served as commodore with the royal navy.
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James Whitcomb Riley
1849 - 1916 (67 years)
James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author. During his lifetime he was known as the "Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and his children's poetry. His poems tend to be humorous or sentimental. Of the approximately 1,000 poems Riley wrote, the majority are in dialect. His famous works include "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Raggedy Man".
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Alfred Döblin
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Bruno Alfred Döblin was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz . A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politi...
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John Addington Symonds
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
John Addington Symonds Jr. was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although married with children, Symonds supported male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible . He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.
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Carlo Gozzi
1720 - 1806 (86 years)
Carlo, Count Gozzi was an Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell'arte. Early life Gozzi was born and died in Venice; he came from a family of minor Venetian aristocracy, the Tiepolos. At a young age, his parents were no longer able to support him financially, so he joined the army in Dalmatia. Three years later, he had returned to Venice and joined the Granelleschi Society. This society was dedicated to the pursuit of preservation of Tuscan literature from the influence of foreign culture; it was particularly interested in saving traditional Italian comedy such as Commedia dell'a...
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Robert Herrick
1591 - 1674 (83 years)
Robert Herrick was a 17th-century English lyric poet and Anglican cleric. He is best known for Hesperides, a book of poems. This includes the carpe diem poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", with the first line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may".
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Ingeborg Bachmann
1926 - 1973 (47 years)
Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet and author. She is regarded as one of the major voices of German-language literature in the 20th century. Early life and education Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of Olga and Matthias Bachmann, a schoolteacher. Her father was an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. She had a sister, Isolde, and a brother, Heinz.
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Granville Hicks
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist and, later, anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor. Early life Granville Hicks was born September 9, 1901, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Frank Stevens and Carrie Weston Hicks. He earned his A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University. In 1925 he married Dorothy Dyer, with whom he had a daughter, Stephanie.
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Benjamin Jowett
1817 - 1893 (76 years)
Benjamin Jowett was an English tutor and administrative reformer in the University of Oxford, a theologian, an Anglican cleric, and a translator of Plato and Thucydides. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
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William Wycherley
1640 - 1716 (76 years)
William Wycherley was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. Early life Wycherley was born at Clive near Shrewsbury, Shropshire, although his birthplace has been said to be Trench Farm to the north near Wem later the birthplace of another writer, John Ireland, who was said to have been adopted by Wycherley's widow following the death of Ireland's parents. He was baptised on 8 April 1641 at Whitchurch, Hampshire, son of Daniel Wycherley and his wife Bethia, daughter of William Shrimpton. His family was settled on a moder...
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Johan Ludvig Runeberg
1804 - 1877 (73 years)
Johan Ludvig Runeberg was a Finnish priest, lyric and epic poet. He wrote exclusively in Swedish. He is considered a national poet of Finland. He is the author of the lyrics to which became an unofficial Finnish national anthem. Runeberg was also involved in the modernization of the Finnish Lutheran hymnal and produced many texts for the new edition.
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Ferdinand Brunetière
1849 - 1906 (57 years)
Ferdinand Vincent-de-Paul Marie Brunetière was a French writer and critic. Personal and public life Early years Brunetière was born in Toulon, Var, Provence. After school at Marseille, he studied in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Desiring a teaching career, he entered for examination at the École Normale Supérieure, but failed, and the outbreak of war in 1870 prevented him trying again. He turned to private tuition and literary criticism. After the publication of successful articles in the Revue Bleue, he became connected with the Revue des Deux Mondes, first as contributor, then as secr...
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Naim Frashëri
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
Naim bey Frashëri, more commonly Naim Frashëri , was an Albanian historian, journalist, poet, rilindas and translator who was proclaimed as the national poet of Albania. He is regarded as a pioneer of modern Albanian literature and one of the most influential Albanian cultural icons of the 19th century.
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Louis Untermeyer
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961. Life and career Untermeyer was born in New York City, the son of a German-Jewish jewelry manufacturer. He initially joined his father's firm as a designer, rising to the rank of vice president, before resigning from the firm in 1923 to devote himself to literary pursuits. He was, for the most part, self-educated.
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Kate Chopin
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Kate Chopin was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and she is one of the more frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.
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Cyrano de Bergerac
1619 - 1655 (36 years)
Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian, and duelist. A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the 17th century. Today, he is best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand's most noted drama, Cyrano de Bergerac , which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains invention and myth.
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Samuel Butler
1835 - 1902 (67 years)
Samuel Butler was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh . Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted.
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Jean de La Bruyère
1645 - 1696 (51 years)
Jean de La Bruyère was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire. Early years Jean de La Bruyère was born in Paris, in today's Essonne département, in 1645. His family was middle class, and his reference to a certain "Geoffroy de La Bruyère", a crusader, is only a satirical illustration of a method of self-ennoblement then common in France, as in some other countries. As such, he signed his surname as Delabruyère in one word, as evidence of this disdain.
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Antanas Baranauskas
1835 - 1902 (67 years)
Antanas Baranauskas was a Lithuanian poet, mathematician and Catholic bishop of Sejny. Baranauskas is best known as the author of the Lithuanian poem Anykščių šilelis. He used various pseudonyms, including A.B., Bangputys, Jurksztas Smalaūsis, Jurkštas Smalaūsis, and Baronas. He also wrote poetry in Polish.
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Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Shmuel Yosef Agnon was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon . In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.
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Louis Couperus
1863 - 1923 (60 years)
Louis Marie-Anne Couperus was a Dutch novelist and poet. His oeuvre contains a wide variety of genres: lyric poetry, psychological and historical novels, novellas, short stories, fairy tales, feuilletons and sketches. Couperus is considered to be one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature. In 1923, he was awarded the Tollensprijs .
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Idrus
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
Idrus was an Indonesian author best known for his realistic short stories and novels. He is known as the representative of the prose of the '45 generation of Indonesian literature. Biography Idrus was born in Padang, West Sumatera on 12 September 1921. His education before the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942 was entirely in Dutch-run schools, where he read works of Western literature and practiced writing short stories; he finished his education in 1943, then began working at Balai Pustaka – the state-owned publisher of the Dutch East Indies – as an editor. Between 1943 a...
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Nikos Kazantzakis
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years, and remains the most translated Greek author worldwide.
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Muriel Rukeyser
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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Daphne du Maurier
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, was an English novelist, biographer and playwright. Her parents were actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and his wife, actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, a writer and cartoonist.
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Cato the Younger
95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.
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Paul Bourget
1852 - 1935 (83 years)
Paul Charles Joseph Bourget was a French poet, novelist and critic. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Paul Bourget was born in Amiens, France. He initially abandoned Catholicism but eventually returned to it in the late 19th century. Bourget is known for his psychological and moralistic novels that often portrayed the complex emotions of women and the ideas, passions, and failures of young men in France. Some of his notable works include Le Disciple , a bestseller that explored the consequences of materialism and positivism, and other novels such as Cruelle Enigme , André Cornelis , and Mensonges .
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Iolo Morganwg
1747 - 1826 (79 years)
Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg , was a Welsh antiquarian, poet and collector. He was seen as an expert collector of Medieval Welsh literature, but it emerged after his death that he had forged several manuscripts, notably some of the Third Series of Welsh Triads. Even so, he had a lasting impact on Welsh culture, notably in founding the secret society known as the Gorsedd, through which Iolo Morganwg successfully co-opted the 18th-century Eisteddfod revival. The philosophy he spread in his forgeries has had an enormous impact upon neo-Druidism. His bardic name i...
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Primo Levi
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man , his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table , a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
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Manuel Bandeira
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho was a Brazilian poet, literary critic, and translator, who wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. Life and career Bandeira was born in Recife, Pernambuco. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather. In 1922, after an extended stay in Europe where Bandeira met many prominent authors and painters, he contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist movement in São Paulo. Bandeira began to publish his most important works in 1924.
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Brander Matthews
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
James Brander Matthews was an American academic, writer and literary critic. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study by academics. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own time.
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George Gissing
1857 - 1903 (46 years)
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best-known works have reappeared in modern editions. They include The Nether World , New Grub Street and The Odd Women .
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Josep Carner
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Josep Carner i Puigoriol , was a Spanish poet, journalist, playwright and translator. He was also known as the Prince of Catalan Poets. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
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Margaret Laurence
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Jean Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and is one of the major figures in Canadian literature. She was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.
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Paul Morand
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Paul Morand was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist and Imagist.
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Adomnán
624 - 704 (80 years)
Adomnán or Adamnán of Iona , also known as Eunan , was an abbot of Iona Abbey , hagiographer, statesman, canon jurist, and saint. He was the author of the Life of Columba , probably written between 697 and 700. This biography is by far the most important surviving work written in early-medieval Scotland, and is a vital source for our knowledge of the Picts, and an insight into the life of Iona and the early-medieval Gaelic monk.
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Namdev
1270 - 1350 (80 years)
Namdev , also transliterated as Nam Dayv, Namdeo, Namadeva, was a Marathi Vaishnav saint from Narsi, Hingoli, Maharashtra, India within the Varkari tradition of Hinduism. He lived as a devotee of Lord Vitthal of Pandharpur. He is widely regarded as the founder of Varkari tradition.
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François Fénelon
1651 - 1715 (64 years)
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon , more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. Today, he is remembered mostly as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699.
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Zachris Topelius
1818 - 1898 (80 years)
Zacharias Topelius was a Finnish author, poet, journalist, historian, and rector of the University of Helsinki who wrote novels related to Finnish history. Given name Zacharias is his baptismal name, and this is used on the covers of his printed works. However, "he himself most often used the abbreviation Z. or the form Zachris, even in official contexts", as explained in the National Biography of Finland. Zachris is therefore the preferred form used in recent academic literature about him.
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John Pentland Mahaffy
1839 - 1919 (80 years)
Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, was an Irish classicist and polymathic scholar. Education and Academic career He was born near Vevey in Switzerland on 26 February 1839 to Irish parents, Nathaniel Brindley Mahaffy and the former Elizabeth Pentland, receiving his early education privately in Switzerland and Germany, and later and more formally at Trinity College Dublin. As an undergraduate, he became President of the University Philosophical Society. He was elected a scholar in 1857, graduated in classics and philosophy in 1859, and was elected a fellow in 1864.
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George Peele
1556 - 1596 (40 years)
George Peele was an English translator, poet, and dramatist, who is most noted for his supposed but not universally accepted collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play Titus Andronicus. Many anonymous Elizabethan plays have been attributed to him, but his reputation rests mainly on Edward I, The Old Wives' Tale, The Battle of Alcazar, The Arraignment of Paris, and David and Bethsabe. The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, the immediate source for Shakespeare's King John, has been published under his name.
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Giovanni Verga
1840 - 1922 (82 years)
Giovanni Carmelo Verga di Fontanabianca was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in his native Sicily, especially the short story and later play Cavalleria rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia .
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Edgar Lee Masters
1868 - 1950 (82 years)
Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
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Erich Kästner
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Emil Erich Kästner was a German writer, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including Emil and the Detectives. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1960 for his autobiography . He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six separate years.
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François Coppée
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist. Biography Coppée was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864. In 1869, his "Poème modernes" were quite successful. In the same year, Coppée's first play, Le Passant, starring Sarah Bernhardt and Madame Agar, was received with approval at the Odéon theatre, and later Fais ce que dois and Les Bijoux de la délivrance , short poetic dramas inspired by the Franco-P...
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Cesare Pavese
1908 - 1950 (42 years)
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time. Early life and education Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started primary school in Santo Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin.
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