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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#9151
Hiram Corson
1828 - 1911 (83 years)
Hiram Corson was an American professor of literature. Life Corson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He held a position in the library of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. , was a lecturer on English literature in Philadelphia , and was professor of English at Girard College, Philadelphia , and in St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland . In 1870-1871 he was professor of rhetoric and oratory at Cornell University, where he was professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature , of English literature and rhetoric , and from 1890 to 1903 of English literature, a chair formed for him.
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August Fick
1833 - 1916 (83 years)
Friedrich Conrad August Fick was a German philologist. He spent his life chiefly at Göttingen, where he first studied philology under Theodor Benfey; became a teacher in the Gymnasium, and eventually in 1876 professor of comparative philology at the university; in 1887 accepted a professorship in Breslau, but retired four years later; author of a variety of learned works on philology.
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James A. Blaisdell
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
James Arnold Blaisdell was an American minister, theologian, and academic administrator. He was the fourth president of Pomona College and founder and "head fellow" of the Claremont Colleges . Life and career He was born in Beloit, Wisconsin; his father was a philosophy professor at Beloit College. Blaisdell graduated from Beloit College in 1889, and went on to become a minister in Waukesha, Wisconsin for a time, until he went back to Beloit College to be the Chair of the Bible Department, as well as the director of the library, in 1903.
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Robert P. T. Coffin
1892 - 1955 (63 years)
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin was an American poet, educator, writer, editor and literary critic. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936, he was the poetry editor for Yankee magazine. Early life Born Robert Peter Coffin, the youngest of ten children to James William Coffin, a descendant of Tristram Coffin and Alice Mary Coombs on a saltwater farm on Sebascodegan Island he earned his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in 1913 and then his Masters of Arts from Princeton University in 1918. In 1922 Coffin was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature by Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
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Theodor Panofka
1800 - 1858 (58 years)
Theodor Sigismund Panofka was a German archaeologist, art historian, and philologist. He was one of the first scholars to make a systematic study of the pottery of Ancient Greece, and one of the founders of the institution later to become the German Archaeological Institute .
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Ella Young
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Ella Young was an Irish poet and Celtic mythologist active in the Gaelic and Celtic Revival literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in Ireland, Young was an author of poetry and children's books. She emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1925 as a temporary visitor and lived in California. For five years she gave speaking tours on Celtic mythology at American universities, and in 1931 she was involved in a publicized immigration controversy when she attempted to become a citizen.
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Mikayel Nalbandian
1829 - 1866 (37 years)
Mikayel Nalbandian was a Russian-Armenian writer, poet, political theorist and activist. Nalbandian was born in Nakhichevan-on-Don, an Armenian town in southern Russia, and traveled extensively, although he visited Armenia itself only once. A radical intellectual, Nalbandian was an avid advocate of secularism and anti-clericalism, the use of modern Armenian and a vocal critic of the conservative clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He also espoused anti-Catholicism. Inspired by the Enlightenment and the Italian unification, Nalbandian advocated reform, cultural nationalism and agrarianism among Armenians.
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Lucian Müller
1836 - 1898 (62 years)
Lucian Müller was a German classical scholar. Life Müller was born in Merseburg in the Province of Saxony. After studying at the universities of Berlin and Halle, he lived for five years in the Netherlands, working on his Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlanden . Unable to obtain a university appointment in Germany, he accepted the professorship of Latin at the Imperial Historico-Philological Institute in St Petersburg.
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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William Henry Ogilvie
1869 - 1963 (94 years)
William Henry Ogilvie was a Scottish-Australian narrative poet and horseman, jackaroo, and drover, and described as a quiet-spoken handsome Scot of medium height, with a fair moustache and red complexion. He was also known as Will Ogilvie, by the pen names including 'Glenrowan' and the lesser 'Swingle-Bar', and by his initials, WHO.
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Peadar O'Donnell
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Peadar O'Donnell was one of the foremost radicals of 20th-century Ireland. O'Donnell became prominent as an Irish republican, socialist activist, politician and writer. Early life Peadar O'Donnell was born into an Irish-speaking family in Meenmore, near Dungloe, County Donegal in 1893. He was the fifth son of James O'Donnell, a kiln worker, migrant labourer, and musician, and Brigid Rodgers. His uncle Peter was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in Butte, Montana, whom Peadar met on trips home to Ireland.
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Viktorin Kornel of Všehrdy
1460 - 1520 (60 years)
Viktorin Kornel ze Všehrd or simply Všehrd , was a Czech humanist and lawyer, working towards the end of the 15th century as Vice-scribe at the Land Court in the Prague Castle. He is famous for the most penetrating analysis of the Czech common law that he has put forward on some 460 pages under the title "On the Laws of the Czech Land Nine Books" . He has also translated some Latin texts.
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John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
1647 - 1680 (33 years)
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court, who reacted against the "spiritual authoritarianism" of the Puritan era. Rochester embodied this new era, and he became as well known for his rakish lifestyle as for his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died as a result of a sexually transmitted infection at the age of 33.
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Curt Wachsmuth
1837 - 1905 (68 years)
Curt Wachsmuth was a German historian and classical philologist. He was a son-in-law to philologist Friedrich Ritschl. Academic biography From 1856 to 1860 he studied at the universities of Jena and Bonn, where he later received his habilitation in classical philology and ancient history. In 1864 he became a professor in ancient history at the University of Marburg, followed by professorships in classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg . From 1885 to 1905 he was a professor of classical philology and ancient history at the University of Leipzig. In 1897/98 he serve...
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August Fischer
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
August Fischer was a German orientalist. From 1883 to 1889 he studied theology and Oriental philology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Halle, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on the source biographies of Ibn Ishaq, Biographien von Gewährsmännern des Ibn Ishaq. In 1890 he obtained his habilitation for Oriental philology at the University of Halle, and several years later became an associate professor in Berlin. From 1900 to 1930 he was a full professor of Oriental philology at the University of Leipzig, where in 1914/15 he served as dean to the faculty of philosophy. For several...
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Robert Benchley
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
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Sultan Walad
1226 - 1312 (86 years)
Baha al-Din Muhammad-i Walad , more popularly known as Sultan Walad was the eldest son of Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Persian poet, Sufi, Hanafi Maturidi Islamic scholar and one of the founders of the Mawlawiya order.
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Pelham Edgar
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Oscar Pelham Edgar was a Canadian teacher. He was a full professor and head of the Department of English at the Victoria College, Toronto from 1910 to 1938. He wrote many articles and several monographs on English literature. He had a talent for identifying and encouraging promising new authors. He was an active member of various literary societies, and was the force behind the establishment of the Canadian Writers’ Foundation to help needy authors.
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Gottfried Kinkel
1815 - 1882 (67 years)
Johann Gottfried Kinkel was a German poet also noted for his revolutionary activities and his escape from a Prussian prison in Spandau with the help of his friend Carl Schurz. Early life He was born at Oberkassel . Having studied theology at Bonn and Berlin, he established himself at Bonn in 1836 as a Privatdozent, or theology tutor, became master at the secondary school there, and was for a short time assistant preacher in Cologne.
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Stewart Parker
1941 - 1988 (47 years)
James Stewart Parker was a Northern Irish poet and playwright. Biography He was born in Sydenham, Belfast, of a Protestant working-class family. His birthplace is marked by an Ulster History Circle blue plaque. While still in his teens, he contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated. He studied for an MA in Poetic Drama at Queen's University, Belfast, on a scholarship, before commencing teaching in the United States at Hamilton College and Cornell University.
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Carl Richard Unger
1817 - 1897 (80 years)
Carl Richard Unger was a Norwegian historian and philologist. Unger was professor of Germanic and Romance philology at the University of Christiania from 1862 and was a prolific editor of Old Norse texts.
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Thomas Gordon
1691 - 1750 (59 years)
Thomas Gordon was a Scottish writer and Commonwealthman. Along with John Trenchard, he published The Independent Whig, which was a weekly periodical. From 1720 to 1723, Trenchard and Gordon wrote a series of 144 essays entitled Cato's Letters, condemning corruption and lack of morality within the British political system and warning against tyranny. The essays were published as Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, at first in the London Journal and then in the British Journal. These essays became a cornerstone of the Commonwealth man tradition and were influential in shaping the ideas of the Country Party.
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Marion Davies
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Mihail Sadoveanu
1880 - 1961 (81 years)
Mihail Sadoveanu was a Romanian novelist, short story writer, journalist and political figure, who twice served as acting head of state for the communist republic . One of the most prolific Romanian-language writers, he is remembered mostly for his historical and adventure novels, as well as for his nature writing. An author whose career spanned five decades, Sadoveanu was an early associate of the traditionalist magazine Sămănătorul, before becoming known as a Realist writer and an adherent to the Poporanist current represented by Viața Românească journal. His books, critically acclaimed for...
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Eugen Prym
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Eugen Prym was a German orientalist, who specialized in Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Aramaic. He was the brother of mathematician Friedrich Prym , and is the great-great grandfather of historian, philosopher, and MacArthur Fellow Jacob Soll.
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Alexandru Lambrior
1845 - 1883 (38 years)
Alexandru Lambrior was a Romanian philologist and folklorist. A native of Fălticeni in Moldavia, he studied at Iași University and, after beginning a career as a teacher, in Paris. He resumed teaching in 1878, but died of tuberculosis five years later. A pioneer of linguistics in his country, he revered the Romanian of the old medieval chronicles, deploring what he saw as the corrosive effects of neologisms. Lambrior compiled a successful anthology of texts covering some three centuries, and his work on early literature existed alongside an interest in folklore, about which he also proposed o...
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H. W. Garrod
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Heathcote William Garrod was a British classical scholar and literary scholar. Early life and education Garrod was born in Wells, Somerset, the fifth of six children of solicitor Charles William Garrod and his wife, Louisa . He attended Bath College and Balliol College, Oxford. He received the 1900 Gaisford prize for Greek prose, and in 1901 the Newdigate Prize for an English poem. Following a first class in the Final Honour School of Literae Humaniores in the summer term of 1901, he was in October that year elected a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a position he kept for over 60 years.
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William Drennan
1754 - 1820 (66 years)
William Drennan was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education.
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Richard Wünsch
1869 - 1915 (46 years)
Richard Wünsch was a German classical philologist. He studied classical philology at the University of Marburg, receiving his doctorate in 1893. Following graduation, he spent two years on an extended study trip to Paris, Spain, Italy and Greece. He obtained his habilitation in Breslau, and in 1902 was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Giessen. Later on, he held professorships at the universities of Königsberg and Münster . In World War I he died at Iłża, while serving as a battalion leader during an assault on the Russian army.
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Pierre-Henri Simon
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Pierre-Henri Simon was a French intellectual, literary historian, essayist, novelist, poet, and literary critic. He won the Prix Ève Delacroix in 1963 Works Essays Destins de la personne, 1935L'Église et la Révolution sociale, 1938L'homme en procès: Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Saint-Exupéry L'Europe a-t-elle une conscience ?, 1953Contre la torture, 1957 Ce que je crois, 1966
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Heinrich Schweizer-Sidler
1815 - 1894 (79 years)
Heinrich Schweizer-Sidler was a Swiss philologist born in Elgg in the canton of Zürich. From 1835 to 1838 he received his education at the University of Zürich, where he had as instructors, Johann Caspar von Orelli, Hermann Sauppe and Bernhard Hirzel. In 1838 he continued his studies in Berlin, afterwards returning to Zürich, where in 1841 he received his habilitation. Later, he taught classes in secondary schools in Aarau and Zürich . In 1849 he became an associate professor at Zürich, and in 1864 was appointed a full professor of philology. In this position he specialized in Sanskrit and ...
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Einar Ólafur Sveinsson
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, often abbreviated Einar Ól. Sveinsson was an Icelandic scholar of Old Norse literature who was Professor of Icelandic Literature at the University of Iceland. His writings on and editions of sagas were particularly influential.
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Carl Wilhelm Böttiger
1807 - 1878 (71 years)
Carl Wilhelm Böttiger was a Swedish writer. Biography He was born in Västerås, and studied at the University of Uppsala, where, after extensive travels, he was appointed professor of modern literature in 1845, and in 1858 professor of aesthetics, from which post he retired in 1867.
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Anica Savić Rebac
1892 - 1953 (61 years)
Anica Savić-Rebac was a Serbian writer, classical philologist, translator, professor at the University of Belgrade. She wrote a number of essays and books about Njegoš, Goethe, Sophocles, Spinoza, Thomas Mann, Greek mystical philosophers, Plato, theory of literature. She also translated a number of works from Serbian into English, most notably The Ray of the Microcosm by Petar II Petrović-Njegoš.
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Xiong Foxi
1900 - 1965 (65 years)
Xiong Foxi was an American-educated Chinese playwright famous for his experimental drama in the Ding County, Hebei Province . His ambition was creating the peasants' drama of educative value. One of the plays, Sleeping on Brushwood and Tasting Gall popularized the topic of "national humiliation" through the image of Goujian, the Yue king of the Spring and Autumn period. He was the first President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
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John Steptoe
1950 - 1989 (39 years)
John Steptoe was an author and illustrator for children’s books dealing with aspects of the African-American experience. He is best known for Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, which was acknowledged by literary critics as a breakthrough in African history and culture.
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Roy Daniells
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Roy Daniells, was a Canadian poetry professor. He helped build the University of British Columbia's creative writing department and fostered the careers of several major Canadian writers. Education and career Daniells was born in London on April 6, 1902, but received the bulk of his education in Canada following his family's relocation to Victoria, BC in 1910. He attended University of British Columbia and University of Toronto, receiving a Ph.D. from the latter in 1936. Thereafter, he worked at the University of Manitoba, heading its English department until 1946 when he took a position at his alma mater UBC.
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Ken'ichi Yoshida
1912 - 1977 (65 years)
Ken'ichi Yoshida was a Japanese author and literary critic in Shōwa period Japan. Early life Yoshida was born in Tokyo as the eldest son of future Prime Minister of Japan Shigeru Yoshida, who at the time was a Japanese diplomat in Rome. His mother Yukiko, a daughter of Count Makino Nobuaki, left Tokyo soon after Ken'ichi's birth to join her husband, so he was raised at the Makino household during the first few years of his life. He started living with his parents at the age of six, when his father was posted to Qingdao, China. Thereafter he lived in Paris, London, and Tianjin before moving back to Tokyo where he graduated from secondary school.
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Richard Brome
1590 - 1653 (63 years)
Richard Brome ; was an English dramatist of the Caroline era. Life Virtually nothing is known about Brome's private life. Repeated allusions in contemporary works, like Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, indicate that Brome started out as a servant of Jonson, in some capacity. Scholars have interpreted the allusions to mean that Brome may have begun as a menial servant but later became a sort of secretary and general assistant to the older playwright. A single brief mention of his family's need seems to show that he had a wife and children and struggled to support them.
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Faiz Ahmad Faiz
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Faiz Ahmad Faiz was a Pakistani poet and author of Punjabi and Urdu literature. Faiz was one of the most celebrated, popular, and influential Urdu writers of his time and his works and ideas remain widely influential today in Pakistan and beyond. Outside of literature, he has been described as "a man of wide experience" having worked as a teacher, military officer, journalist, trade unionist, and broadcaster.
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Hernán Núñez
1475 - 1553 (78 years)
Hernán Núñez de Toledo y Guzmán was a Spanish humanist, classicist, philologist, and paremiographer. He was called el Comendador Griego, el Pinciano or Fredenandus Nunius Pincianus. He earned his degree in 1490 from the Spanish College of San Clemente in Bologna. He returned to Spain in 1498 and served as a preceptor to the Mendoza family, in Granada. In this city, he studied classical languages as well as Hebrew and Arabic. Cardinal Gonzalo Ximénez de Cisneros hired him as censor of the cardinal's press at Alcalá de Henares. There, Nuñez worked on the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, specifically on the Septuagint.
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Alexandru Philippide
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Alexandru I. Philippide was a Romanian linguist and philologist. Educated in Iași and Halle, he taught high school for several years until 1893, when he secured a professorship at the University of Iași that he would hold until his death forty years later. He began publishing books on the Romanian language around the time he graduated from university, but it was not until he became a professor that he drew wider attention, thanks to a study of the language's history. Although not particularly ideological, he penned sharp, witty polemics directed at various intellectual figures, both at home a...
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Richard Heinze
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Richard Heinze was a German classical philologist. He was a younger brother to politician Rudolf Heinze . Heinze was born on 11 August 1867 in Naumburg, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia. He studied classical philology at the University of Leipzig under Otto Ribbeck , later relocating to the University of Bonn , where he had as instructors, Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler . Afterwards, he studied in Berlin with Theodor Mommsen , earning his habilitation in 1893 at the University of Strasbourg with a treatise on the philosopher Xenocrates.
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Jun Ishiwara
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Jun Ishiwara or Atsushi Ishihara was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for his works on the electronic theory of metals, the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Being the only Japanese scientist who made an original contribution to the old quantum theory, in 1915, independently of other scientists, he formulated quantization rules for systems with several degrees of freedom.
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Robert Nichols
1893 - 1944 (51 years)
Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols was an English writer, known as a war poet of the First World War, and a playwright. Life and career The son of the poet John Bowyer Buchanan Nichols, Robert Nichols was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. Commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1914, Nichols served on the Western Front, including the Battle of Loos and the Battle of the Somme, until invalided home with shell shock in August 1916.
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Karl Zangemeister
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Zangemeister was a German librarian and philologist. He studied classical philology at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1862 with the thesis De Horatii vocibus singularibus dissertatio. Afterwards, he worked on the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum project in Italy, and from 1868 to 1873 was a librarian at the Ducal Library in Gotha. In 1873 he relocated to the University of Heidelberg as senior librarian, being named a professor of classical philology in 1875. From 1894 to 1902 he was associated with the Central Directorate of the Königliche...
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Johann Georg Graevius
1632 - 1703 (71 years)
Johann Georg Graevius was a German classical scholar and critic. He was born in Naumburg, in the Electorate of Saxony. Life Graevius was originally intended for the law, but made the acquaintance of Johann Friedrich Gronovius during a casual visit to Deventer, under whose influence he abandoned jurisprudence for philology. He completed his studies under Daniel Heinsius at Leiden, and among others under the Protestant theologian David Blondel at Amsterdam.
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Horace Howard Furness
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
Horace Howard Furness was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century. Life and career Horace Furness was the son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness , and brother of the architect Frank Furness . He graduated from Harvard University in 1854, embarked on a journey to Europe with Atherton Blight, and then studied in Germany. After returning to the United States, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1858, but his growing deafness interfered with the practice of law.
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Wilson Follett
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Roy Wilson Follett was an American writer known for writing the draft form of what became Follett's Modern American Usage, which was unfinished at his death and was completed and edited by his friend Jacques Barzun and published posthumously.
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Christian Matras
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Christian Matras was a Faroese poet and academic. He was the founding professor of the University of the Faroe Islands. He is one of the most important poets in Faroese literature. Life Christian Matras was born in the village Viðareiði, Viðoy, located at far northern end of the Faroe Islands. The surname Matras goes back to an immigrant from France. He attended primary school until he moved to Tórshavn in 1912, where he attended secondary school. He was in a class with Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen and William Heinesen. In 1920, Matras moved to Sorø, Denmark, where he completed his schooling
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