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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#9151

Robert Maxwell Ogilvie

1932 - 1981 (49 years)

Robert Maxwell Ogilvie FRSE FSA FBA DLitt was a British scholar of Latin literature and classical philology. Life His parents were Sir Frederick Wolff Ogilvie , director-general of the BBC from 1938 to 1942, and Lady Ogilvie , principal of St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1966.

#9152

Charles Alexander Robinson Jr.

1900 - 1965 (65 years)

Charles Alexander Robinson Jr. was an American classical scholar. The son of Princeton classics professor Charles A. Robinson, he graduated from Princeton in 1922. He spent post-graduate years at the American Academy in Rome, where he met Celia Sachs, daughter of art historian Paul J. Sachs. Robinson later became a professor at Brown University. Some of his books are: Alexander the Great , Ancient History , The Spring of Civilization , Athens in the Age of Pericles , and Hellenic History , which he rewrote and revised from G. W. Botsford's 1922 book.

#9153

Gerald Else

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Gerald Frank Else was a distinguished American classicist. He was professor of Greek and Latin at University of Michigan and University of Iowa. Else is substantially credited with the refinement of Aristotelian scholarship in aesthetics in the 20th century to expand the reading of catharsis alone to include the aesthetic triad of mimesis, hamartia, and catharsis as all essentially linked to each other.

#9154

Jan Hendrik Waszink

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Jan Hendrik Waszink was a Dutch Latin scholar, Professor of Latin at Leiden University. Best known as an expert on Tertullian, he also edited the translation and commentary by Calcidius on Plato's Timaeus.

#9155

Vardis Fisher

1895 - 1968 (73 years)

Vardis Alvero Fisher was an American writer from Idaho who wrote popular historical novels of the Old West. After studying at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, Fisher taught English at the University of Utah and then at the Washington Square College of New York University until 1931. He worked with the Federal Writers' Project to write the Works Project Administration The Idaho Guide, which was published in 1937. In 1939, Fisher wrote Children of God, a historical novel concerning the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . The novel won the Harper Prize. In 19...

#9156

Ben Edwin Perry

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Ben Edwin Perry was an American professor of classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1924 to 1960. He held Guggenheim Fellowships in the years 1930-1931 and 1954-1955. He developed the Perry Index.

#9157

Ivan Morris

1925 - 1976 (51 years)

Ivan Ira Esme Morris was an English writer, translator and editor in the field of Japanese studies. Biography Ivan Morris was born in London, of mixed American and Swedish parentage to Edita Morris and Ira Victor Morris . He studied at Gordonstoun, before graduating from Phillips Academy. He graduated with magna cum laude at Harvard University and received a doctorate at the SOAS University of London, specializing in Oriental languages. As an intelligence officer for the U.S. Navy, Morris was one of the first interpreters sent into Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb.

#9158

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder

1897 - 1975 (78 years)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth– and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

#9159

Brooks Otis

1908 - 1977 (69 years)

Brooks Otis was an American classicist. Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard in 1929, took the M.A. in 1930, and received the Ph.D. in 1935. Otis taught at Hobart College from 1935 to 1957, then at American University of Beirut for one year before accepting a position at Stanford University as Professor of Classics. In 1970 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he followed T. Robert S. Broughton as George L. Paddison Professor of Latin. While at Stanford Otis was one of the founders of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy, in 1965. ...

#9160

Robert Guy Howarth

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

#9161

John Ciardi

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio.

#9162

Arthur E. Gordon

1902 - 1989 (87 years)

Arthur Ernest Gordon was an American classical philologist and epigraphist. Life and career Born in Marlborough, Vermont, Gordon studied classical philology at Dartmouth College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923. He continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1925 he became a lecturer in Latin at Dartmouth College and in 1928 at Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1929, where he worked with Tenney Frank, and afterwards briefly taught Latin and Ancient History at the University of Vermont. Gordon was invited to the University ...

#9163

Joseph Wood Krutch

Joseph Wood Krutch

1893 - 1970 (77 years)

Joseph Wood Krutch was an American author, critic, and naturalist who wrote nature books on the American Southwest. He is known for developing a pantheistic philosophy. Biography Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he was educated at the University of Tennessee and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. After serving in the army in 1918, he traveled in Europe for a year with his friend, Mark Van Doren. Following World War I, he taught English composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic.

#9164

R. A. B. Mynors

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors was an English classicist and medievalist who held the senior chairs of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A textual critic, he was an expert in the study of manuscripts and their role in the reconstruction of classical texts.

#9165

Gerald Wendt

1891 - 1973 (82 years)

Gerald L. Wendt was a chemist who became a writer and lecturer on popular science. He was director of science and education at the New York World's Fair, an editor at Time magazine and Science Illustrated, and worked for UNESCO.

#9166

Gilbert Seldes

1893 - 1970 (77 years)

Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz . He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding...

#9167

Charlton Laird

1901 - 1984 (83 years)

Charlton Grant Laird was an American linguist, lexicographer, novelist, and essayist. Laird created the 1971 edition of the Webster's New World Thesaurus that became the standardized edition still used today. During his lifetime, he was probably best known for his language studies: books, textbooks, and reference works elucidating the English language for the layman along with his numerous contributions to dictionaries and thesauruses.

#9168

Gertrude Smith

1894 - 1985 (91 years)

Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.

#9169

Hyatt Howe Waggoner

1913 - 1988 (75 years)

Hyatt Howe Waggoner was a professor of English. He is today best known for his work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches , Hawthorne: A Critical Study and The Presence of Hawthorne , and in 1978 played a pivotal role in the authentication of the novelist's "lost notebook". In the year of Waggoner's death, he was honoured with the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award. He did not, however, confine his output to one author: "I've moved around the field", he declared, "at the risk of being superficial." Among the other literary figures who incurred his att...

#9170

Louis Gernet

1882 - 1962 (80 years)

Louis Gernet was a French philologist and sociologist. Life A student at the École Normale Supérieure , he received a licentiate in law and agrégation in grammar. In 1917, supported by the Fondation Thiers, he received his doctorate in letters with a dissertation entitled "Researches on the development of legal and moral thought in Greece".

#9171

Otto Skutsch

1906 - 1990 (84 years)

Otto Skutsch was a German-born British classicist and academic, specialising in classical philosophy. He was Professor of Latin at University College London from 1951 to 1972. Early life Skutsch was born on 6 December 1906 in Breslau, then in the German Empire. He was the third child of Franz Skutsch, a German classical philologist. He was six years old when his father died. He was educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Breslau. He then studied at the University of Breslau, the University of Kiel, the University of Berlin, and the University of Göttingen. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1934.

#9172

Israel Edward Drabkin

1905 - 1965 (60 years)

Israel E. Drabkin was an American classicist and historian of science, medicine, and mathematics. He spent much of his career at the City College of New York. He is known for his studies of Caelius Aurelianus and Galileo.

#9173

Gregory Tschebotarioff

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, , was a Russian-born civil engineer and prolific author. His memoir Russia, My Native Land recounted his experiences as a boy and young man in Russia, where he served in the military during World War I.

#9174

James Runcieman Sutherland

1900 - 1996 (96 years)

Sir James Runcieman Sutherland, FBA was an English literary scholar, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern Literature at London University. Life Sutherland was born on 26 April 1900 in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University before studying at Merton College, Oxford. From 1930 to 1936 he was Senior Lecturer at University College London. He married Helen Dircks in 1931. From 1936 to 1944 he was Professor of English Literature, and from 1944 to 1951 Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen Mary College. In 1951 he was appointed Lord Northcliffe P...

#9175

J. Seelye Bixler

J. Seelye Bixler

1894 - 1985 (91 years)

Julius Seelye Bixler was the 16th President of Colby College, Maine, United States, from 1942–1960. Early life Born Julius Seelye Bixler in New London, CT, to James William Bixler and Elizabeth J. Seelye Bixler. His father was a clergyman who was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate. His maternal grandfather was Julius Hawley Seelye, president of Amherst College from 1876–90, and his grand-uncle was Laurenus Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College.

#9176

Lawrance Thompson

1906 - 1973 (67 years)

Lawrance Roger Thompson 3 April 1906 — 15 April 1973 Early life and education Thompson was born on 3 April 1906 in Franklin, New Hampshire. For his post-secondary education, Thompson received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1928 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1939.

#9177

Wolfgang Schadewaldt

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

Wolfgang Schadewaldt was a German classical philologist working mostly in the field of Greek philology and a translator. He also was a professor of University of Tübingen and University of Freiburg.

#9178

Lewis Thorpe

1913 - 1977 (64 years)

Lewis Guy Melville Thorpe FRSA FRHistS was a British philologist and translator. He was married to the Italian scholar and lexicographer Barbara Reynolds. After service in Italy in the Second World War, Lewis Thorpe joined the staff of the University of Nottingham in 1946. He was Professor of French there from 1958 to 1977. He served as President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

#9179

Ivan Mortimer Linforth

1879 - 1976 (97 years)

Ivan Mortimer Linforth was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at University of California, Berkeley. According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus , in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature. His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars. His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece.

#9180

Theodore Spencer

1902 - 1949 (47 years)

Theodore Spencer was an American poet and academic. Life He graduated from Princeton University in 1923, and a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1928. He then taught there, from 1927 to 1949. He was appointed lecturer in English literature at Cambridge University, England, in 1939. In 1942, Spencer gave the Lowell lectures on Shakespeare, published as Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, his most important work. Spencer also published essays, short stories, and poetry.

#9181

E. Talbot Donaldson

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was a scholar of medieval English literature, known for his 1966 translation of Beowulf and his writings on Chaucer's poetry. Biography Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was born on 18 March 1910 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Harvard University, gaining his BA in 1932. He began his career by teaching languages at the Kent School in Connecticut. He was awarded a fellowship at Yale University in 1942, rising to become the George E. Bodman Professor of English there. During the Second World War he served in the United States Air Force, rising through the ranks from private to captain.

#9182

Frederick Rees

1883 - 1967 (84 years)

Sir James Frederick Rees , known as Frederick Rees, was a Welsh historian and academic born in Milford Haven, who specialised in economic history and the history of Wales. From 1929 to 1949, he was Principal of University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. He was additionally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1935 to 1937 and also from 1944 to 1946. He had previously lectured at University College, Bangor, Queen's University Belfast, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Birmingham. He served as High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire for 1955.

#9183

R. P. Blackmur

1904 - 1965 (61 years)

Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet. Life Blackmur was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Cambridge High and Latin School, but was expelled in 1918. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934.

#9184

Ernest Weekley

1865 - 1954 (89 years)

Ernest Weekley was a British philologist, best known as the author of a number of works on etymology. His An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English has been cited as a source by most authors of similar books over the 90 years since it was published. From 1898 to 1938, he was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham.

#9185

Robert J. Getty

1908 - 1963 (55 years)

Robert John Getty was a Classicist and expert on the ancient author Lucan. Getty earned an A.B. from Queens University, Belfast, in 1928 and a master's degree from St John's College, Cambridge in 1930, where he was lecturer from 1937–1947. He became professor of Latin at the University of Toronto in 1947. In 1958 he became the first George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#9186

Ángel Rosenblat

Ángel Rosenblat

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Ángel Rosenblat was a Poland-born Venezuelan philologist, essayist and hispanist of Jewish descent. Life He and his family moved to Argentina when he was six and he spent his whole education there, including at the University of Buenos Aires, where his classmates included Amado Alonso, and in its Institute of Philology, where his teachers included Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

#9187

Nicoletta Momigliano

1900 - Present (126 years)

Nicoletta Momigliano is an archaeologist specialising in Minoan Crete and its modern reception. Early life and education Momigliano was born in Milan, Italy, in 1960, where she attended primary and secondary school. She read Classics at the University of Pisa, where she graduated in 1982. She obtained her MA from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London , and her PhD from University College London , under the supervision of John Nicolas Coldstream. From 1990 to 1993 she was a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Research Assistant to Ann Br...

#9188

Caroline Spurgeon

Caroline Spurgeon

1869 - 1942 (73 years)

Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon was an English literary critic. In 1913, she was appointed Hildred Carlisle Professor of English at the University of London and became head of the Department of English at Bedford College, London. She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain . She co-founded the International Federation of University Women with Virginia Gildersleeve.

#9189

Gleb Struve

1898 - 1985 (87 years)

Gleb Petrovich Struve was a Russian poet and literary historian. Biography Gleb Petrovich Struve was born on 1 May 1898. His father was the political theorist Peter Berngardovich Struve. Struve came from St. Petersburg and joined the Volunteer Army in 1918. Later that year he fled to Finland, then to Britain, where he studied at the University of Oxford until 1921. It was there that he met Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he remained on friendly terms and corresponded until the novelist's death.

#9190

John Neihardt

1881 - 1973 (92 years)

John Gneisenau Neihardt was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had displaced.

#9191

Gilbert Norwood

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Gilbert Norwood was a British classical philologist and essayist. Life Gilbert Norwood studied at St John's College of Cambridge University with John Edwin Sandys and Richard Claverhouse Jebb. After completing his Bachelor's degree , he was employed as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Manchester. He also completed his master's at Cambridge and was a Fellow at St. John's College from 1906 to 1909.

#9192

Frank Aydelotte

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Franklin Ridgeway Aydelotte was a U.S. educator. He became the first non-Quaker president of Swarthmore College and between 1921 and 1940 redefined the institution. He was active in the Rhodes Scholar program, helped evacuate intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis during the 1930s and served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study during World War II.

#9193

John Berryman

1914 - 1972 (58 years)

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.

#9194

Edith Morley

1875 - 1964 (89 years)

Edith Julia Morley, was a literary scholar and activist. She was the main twentieth century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was a Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, now the University of Reading, from 1908 to 1940, making her the first woman to be appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution. She was a socialist and member of the Fabian society, active in various suffrage campaigns, and received an OBE for her efforts coordinating Reading's refugee programme during the Second World War.

#9195

Gabriel Turville-Petre

Gabriel Turville-Petre

1908 - 1978 (70 years)

Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born at Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire to a prominent Roman Catholic family, Turville-Petre was educated in English at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of J. R. R. Tolkien. He eventually became Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford and a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research. He was the husband of fellow philologist Joan Turville-Petre, who was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at Oxford. Turville-Pet...

#9196

Nicholas Vakar

1894 - 1970 (76 years)

Nicholas P. Vakar , Belarusian, author of Belorussia: The Making of a Nation. Harvard U. Press. 1956 and The Taproot of Soviet Society. Harper. 1959. A Word Count of Spoken Russian. OSU Press, 1966.

#9197

Yoo Juhyun

1921 - 1982 (61 years)

Yoo Juhyun was a South Korean novelist. He was a prolific writer, having written 26 full-length novels and over 100 novellas and short stories. His early works were mostly devoted to social issues, but the majority of his works since the 1960s are historical novels. Unlike conventional historical novels that focus on entertainment, his novels feature profound historical perspectives. His representative work Joseonchongdokbu has received critical attention for its realistic depiction of the Korean people’s sufferings during the 36 years of Japanese colonial rule.

#9198

William Sale Jr.

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

William Merritt Sale Jr. was a professor of English at Cornell University, considered an authority on 18th-century English literature. After studying at Yale, where Chauncey Brewster Tinker directed his thesis, Sale went on to join the faculty at Cornell in 1936. Named Goldwin Smith Professor of English in 1959, he was named professor emeritus upon retirement in 1968.

#9199

S. Foster Damon

1893 - 1971 (78 years)

Samuel Foster Damon was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. When remembered as a Blake scholar, he is often compared in importance to Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman.

#9200

Charles Upson Clark

1875 - 1960 (85 years)

Charles Upson Clark was a professor of history at Columbia University. He discovered the Barberini Codex, the earliest Aztec writings on herbal medicines extant. Biography Clark was born in 1875 to Edward Perkins Clark and Catharine Pickens Upson. Throughout his life he was the author of many books on a variety of subjects. Among them was the history of West Indies by Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa translated into English, and the modern history of Romania.

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