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,
#9201
Pietro Aretino
1492 - 1556 (64 years)
Pietro Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.
Go to Profile#9202
Phillis Wheatley
1753 - 1784 (31 years)
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
Go to Profile#9203
Ivan Cankar
1876 - 1918 (42 years)
Ivan Cankar was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and political activist. Together with Oton Župančič, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature. He is regarded as the greatest writer in Slovene, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.
Go to Profile#9204
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was a German classical philologist. Wilamowitz, as he is known in scholarly circles, was a renowned authority on Ancient Greece and its literature.
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Leo Spitzer
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.
Go to Profile#9206
Nathaniel Parker Willis
1806 - 1867 (61 years)
Nathaniel Parker Willis , also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern. Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography while being employed as his children's nurse.
Go to Profile#9207
William Michael Rossetti
1829 - 1919 (90 years)
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic. Early life Born in London, Rossetti was a son of exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and his wife Frances Rossetti née Polidori; he was the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.
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Baltasar Gracián
1601 - 1658 (57 years)
Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J. , better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud . His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
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Miroslav Krleža
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Miroslav Krleža was a Yugoslav and Croatian writer who is widely considered to be the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century. He wrote notable works in all the literary genres, including poetry , theater , short stories , novels , and an intimate diary. His works often include themes of bourgeois hypocrisy and conformism in Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Krleža wrote numerous essays on problems of art, history, politics, literature, philosophy, and military strategy, and was known as one of the great polemicists of the century. His style combines visionary poetic languag...
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John Millington Synge
1871 - 1909 (38 years)
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen , Riders to the Sea , The Well of the Saints , and The Tinker's Wedding .
Go to Profile#9211
Edmund Blunden
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Edmund Charles Blunden was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.
Go to Profile#9212
Luis Cernuda
1905 - 1963 (58 years)
Luis Cernuda Bidón was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain.
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Muhammad al-Bukhari
810 - 870 (60 years)
Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari , commonly referred to as Imām al-Bukhāri or Imām Bukhāri, was a 9th-century Muslim muhaddith who is widely regarded as the most important hadith scholar in the history of Sunni Islam. Al-Bukhari's extant works include the hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari, Al-Tarikh al-Kabir, and Al-Adab al-Mufrad.
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet and playwright. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on three occasions and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Early life Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine on December 22, 1869. His parents were Edward and Mary . They had wanted a girl, and did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort—at which point other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected the name "Edwin" from a hat containing a random set of boy's names. The man who drew the name was from Arlington, Massachusetts, so "Arlington" was used for his middle name.
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Jean Paulhan
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie française. He was born in Nîmes and died in Paris.
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Louis L'Amour
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels, though he called his work "frontier stories". His most widely known Western fiction works include Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Hondo, Shalako, and the Sackett series. L'Amour also wrote historical fiction , science fiction , non-fiction , and poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. His books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death, almost all of his 105 existing works were still in...
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Anna Laetitia Barbauld
1743 - 1825 (82 years)
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career that spanned more than half a century.
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Julian Tuwim
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Julian Tuwim , known also under the pseudonym "Oldlen" as a lyricist, was a Polish poet, born in Łódź, then part of the Russian Partition. He was educated in Łódź and in Warsaw where he studied law and philosophy at Warsaw University. After Poland's return to independence in 1918, Tuwim co-founded the Skamander group of experimental poets with Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. He was a major figure in Polish literature, admired also for his contribution to children's literature. He was a recipient of the prestigious Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1935.
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Johann Heinrich Voss
1751 - 1826 (75 years)
Johann Heinrich Voss was a German classicist and poet, known mostly for his translation of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad into German. Life Voss was born at Sommersdorf in Mecklenburg-Strelitz as the son of a farmer. After attending the Gymnasium at Neubrandenburg from 1766–1769, he was obliged to accept a private tutorship in order to earn money to enable him to study at a university.
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Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Life He was born Tadeu Hâjdeu in Cristineștii Hotinului , northern Bessarabia, at the time part of Imperial Russia. His father was the writer Alexandru Hâjdeu, a descendant of the Hâjdău family of Moldovan boyars, with noted Polish connections.
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Lion Feuchtwanger
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. Feuchtwanger's Judaism and fierce criticism of the Nazi Party, years before it assumed power, ensured that he would be a target of government-sponsored persecution after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Following a brief period of internment in France and a harrowing escape from continental Europe, he found asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.
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Vatroslav Jagić
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
Vatroslav Jagić was a Croatian scholar of Slavic studies in the second half of the 19th century. Life Jagić was born in Varaždin, where he attended the elementary school and is the place where he started his secondary-school education. He finished that level of education at the Gymnasium in Zagreb. Having a particular interest in philology, he moved to Vienna, where he was lectured in Slavic studies under the guidance of Franz Miklosich. He continued his studies and defended his doctoral dissertation Das Leben der Wurzel 'dê in Croatischen Sprachen in Leipzig in 1871.
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Guy Bolton
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Guy Reginald Bolton was an Anglo-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the US, he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the US, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby ...
Go to Profile#9224
Oswald de Andrade
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Modern Art Week .
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Maironis
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Maironis was a Lithuanian Roman Catholic priest and the greatest and most-known Lithuanian poet, especially of the period of the Lithuanian press ban. He was called the Bard of Lithuanian National Revival . Maironis was active in public life. However, the Lithuanian literary historian Juozas Brazaitis writes that Maironis was not.
Go to Profile#9226
Pierre de Ronsard
1524 - 1585 (61 years)
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets". Ronsard was born at Manoir de la Possonnière in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, Vendômois. His father served Francis I as maître d'hôtel du roi. Ronsard received an education at home before attending the College of Navarre in Paris at age nine. He later travelled extensively, including visits to Scotland, Flanders, and Holland. After a hearing impairment halted his diplomatic career, Ronsard dedicated himself to study at the Collège Coqueret.
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François-René de Chateaubriand
1768 - 1848 (80 years)
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe , published posthumously in 1849–1850.
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Ferenc Molnár
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Ferenc Molnár , often anglicized as Franz Molnar, was a Hungarian-born author, stage director, dramatist, and poet, widely regarded as Hungary's most celebrated and controversial playwright. His primary aim through his writing was to entertain by transforming his personal experiences into literary works of art. He never connected to any one literary movement. However, he did utilize the precepts of naturalism, Neo-Romanticism, Expressionism, and Freudian psychoanalytic theories, but only as long as they suited his desires. "By fusing the realistic narrative and stage tradition of Hungary with ...
Go to Profile#9229
Hayim Nahman Bialik
1873 - 1934 (61 years)
Hayim Nahman Bialik was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to a new spirit of his time, and recognized today as Israel's national poet. Being a noted essayist and story-teller, Bialik also translated major works from European languages.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Henrik Wergeland
1808 - 1845 (37 years)
Henrik Arnold Thaulow Wergeland was a Norwegian writer, most celebrated for his poetry but also a prolific playwright, polemicist, historian, and linguist. He is often described as a leading pioneer in the development of a distinctly Norwegian literary heritage and of modern Norwegian culture.
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Edgar Wallace
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure and sci-fi novels, plays and stories. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men . Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised shor...
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Valerius Maximus
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Valerius Maximus was a 1st-century Latin writer and author of a collection of historical anecdotes: . He worked during the reign of Tiberius . During the Middle Ages, Valerius Maximus was one of the most copied Latin prose authors, second only to Priscian. More than 600 medieval manuscripts of his books have survived as a result.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
1613 - 1680 (67 years)
François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac was an accomplished French moralist of the era of French Classical literature and author of Maximes and Memoirs, the only two works of his dense literary œuvre published. His Maximes portrays the callous nature of human conduct, with a cynical attitude towards putative virtue and avowals of affection, friendship, love, and loyalty. Leonard Tancock regards Maximes as "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature", with his "experience, his likes and dislikes, sufferings and petty spites ...
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Naomi Mitchison
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
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Poliziano
1454 - 1494 (40 years)
Agnolo Ambrogini , commonly known as Angelo Poliziano or simply Poliziano, anglicized as Politian, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano .
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Gil Vicente
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Gil Vicente , called the Trobadour, was a Portuguese playwright and poet who acted in and directed his own plays. Considered the chief dramatist of Portugal he is sometimes called the "Portuguese Plautus," often referred to as the "Father of Portuguese drama" and as one of Western literature's greatest playwrights. Also noted as a lyric poet, Vicente worked in Spanish as much as he worked in Portuguese and is thus, with Juan del Encina, considered joint-father of Spanish drama.
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Frank O'Hara
1926 - 1966 (40 years)
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
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Molière
1622 - 1673 (51 years)
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin , known by his stage name Molière , was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the "language of Molière".
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Donald Barthelme
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction , and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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François Mauriac
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française , and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.
Go to Profile#9242
Patrick Kavanagh
1904 - 1967 (63 years)
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.
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William Langland
1332 - 1386 (54 years)
William Langland is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman.
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Georg Wissowa
1859 - 1931 (72 years)
Georg Otto August Wissowa was a German classical philologist born in Neudorf, near Breslau. Education and career Wissowa studied classical philology under August Reifferscheid at the University of Breslau from 1876 to 1880, then furthered his studies in Munich under Heinrich Brunn, a leading authority on Roman antiquities. Having obtained his habilitation at the University of Breslau in 1882, he received a travel scholarship from the German Archaeological Institute and went to Italy for a year. After that he taught as Privatdozent in Breslau from 1883 to 1886, when he accepted a chair at the University of Marburg where he was awarded a full professorship in 1890.
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Ernst Robert Curtius
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Ernst Robert Curtius was a German literary scholar, philologist, and Romance languages literary critic, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
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Ioan Slavici
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Ioan Slavici was a Romanian writer and journalist from Austria-Hungary, later Romania. He made his debut in Convorbiri literare , with the comedy Fata de birău . Alongside Mihai Eminescu he founded the Young Romania Social and Literary Academic Society and organized, in 1871, the Putna Celebration of the Romanian Students from Romania and from abroad. At the end of 1874, he settled in Bucharest, where he became secretary of the Hurmuzachi Collection Committee, then he became a professor, and then an editor of the newspaper Timpul . Alongside Ion Luca Caragiale and George Coșbuc, he edited the Vatra magazine.
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Jørgen Moe
1813 - 1882 (69 years)
Jørgen Engebretsen Moe was a Norwegian folklorist, bishop, poet, and author. He is best known for the Norske Folkeeventyr, a collection of Norwegian folk tales which he edited in collaboration with Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. He also served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Kristianssand from 1874 until his death in 1882.
Go to Profile#9248
Adam Oehlenschläger
1779 - 1850 (71 years)
Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger was a Danish poet and playwright. He introduced romanticism into Danish literature. He wrote the lyrics to the song Der er et yndigt land, which is one of the national anthems of Denmark.
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Qu Yuan
343 BC - 278 BC (65 years)
Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet and aristocrat in the State of Chu during the Warring States period. He is known for his patriotism and contributions to classical poetry and verses, especially through the poems of the Chu Ci anthology : a volume of poems attributed to or considered to be inspired by his verse writing. Together with the Shi Jing, the Chu Ci is one of the two greatest collections of ancient Chinese verse. He is also remembered in connection to the supposed origin of the Dragon Boat Festival.
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Franz Werfel
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh , a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette , a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
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