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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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#9301

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.

#9302

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.

#9303

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...

#9304

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.

#9305

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.

#9306

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.

#9307

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.

#9308

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...

#9309

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.

#9310

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.

#9311

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.

#9312

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.

#9313

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.

#9314

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.

#9315

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.

#9316

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.

#9317

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.

#9318

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.

#9319

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.

#9320

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.

#9321

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...

#9322

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.

#9323

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.

#9324

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.

#9325

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.

#9326

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.

#9327

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.

#9328

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.

#9329

Vernon Watkins

1906 - 1967 (61 years)

Vernon Phillips Watkins was a Welsh poet and translator. He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English".

#9330

Frederic Ewen

1899 - 1988 (89 years)

Frederic Ewen was an English professor at Brooklyn College from 1930 to 1952. During the height of the McCarthy period Ewen was forced to resign his teaching position after refusing to cooperate with a Senate Internal Security Committee investigation of communism and higher education.

#9331

Walter de Haas

1886 - 1969 (83 years)

Walter de Haas , who wrote under the pseudonym Hanns Günther, was a prolific German author, translator, and editor of popular science books. He began to publish books in 1912, including introductions to topics in electrical engineering under the Franckh'schen Verlagshandlung imprint and popular science works in the same publisher's Kosmos series. His books remain exemplary for their combination of exactness and ease of understanding.

#9332

Margaret Ashmun

1875 - 1940 (65 years)

Margaret Eliza Ashmun was an American writer from Rural, Wisconsin. She trained as a teacher and taught for a few years then concentrated on her writing. She edited collections of short stories and writing textbooks, and wrote dozens of poems, essays, and stories that were published in the popular magazines and newspapers of her day. She was the author of more than 18 novels for both adults and young readers, especially girls.

#9333

James Taft Hatfield

James Taft Hatfield

1862 - 1945 (83 years)

James Taft Hatfield was an American philologist and professor at Northwestern University where for many years he was the head of the German Department. Although he also published works on comparative linguistics, Sanskrit, church music, and American folklore, he was primarily known for his contributions to German studies, and in particular his studies on the writings of Goethe and Wilhelm Müller and on the influence of German culture in the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

#9334

Richard von Kienle

1908 - 1985 (77 years)

Richard von Kienle was a German linguist who specialized in Germanic and Indo-European linguistics. Biography Richard von Kienle was born in Freiburg, Germany on 9 February 1908. He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg in 1931 under the supervision of Hermann Güntert. von Kienle subsequently served as an assistant at the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch under . Since the summer of 1938 he was an acting professor at the University of Heidelberg, having stepped in for Güntert, who was in poor health at the time. He was later an acting professor at the University of Jena under . Since 1940...

#9335

Randall V. Mills

1907 - 1952 (45 years)

Randall V. Mills was a professor of literature with a variety of interests related to the Pacific Northwest, including steamboats, railroads and folklore. Early life and education Randall was born in Wisconsin in 1907. In 1929 Mills received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles . His master's degree was received from University of California, Berkeley in 1932.

#9336

Juho August Hollo

Juho August Hollo

1885 - 1967 (82 years)

Juho August Hollo , also known as J. A. Hollo, was a Finnish scholar and professor of education at the University of Helsinki from 1930 to 1954. He was one of the most prolific translators into Finnish, translating a range of genres and from several languages. He himself said in 1953 that he had translated 170 books; some sources list over 300. Among the authors he translated were Miguel de Cervantes, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was als...

#9337

Arna Bontemps

1902 - 1973 (71 years)

Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. They w...

#9338

Dorothy Burr Thompson

1900 - 2001 (101 years)

Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...

#9339

Friedrich Münzer

1868 - 1942 (74 years)

Friedrich Münzer was a German classical scholar noted for the development of prosopography, particularly for his demonstrations of how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles. He died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

#9340

Natalino Sapegno

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Natalino Sapégno was a literary critic and Italian academician. He came to prominence as a leading scholar of fourteenth century Italian literature. Biography Provenance and early years Natalino Sapégno was born in Aosta, which was the city from where his mother's family came. However, he spent his first sixteen years growing up in Turin, where his father was employed as a senior official with the government tax office. In 1917, along with his older sister Giuliana, he was entrusted, for a year, to the care of his maternal grandparents in Aosta. Here, for a year, he completed his sc...

#9341

Enrica Malcovati

Enrica Malcovati

1894 - 1990 (96 years)

Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.

#9342

Clive Carruthers

1891 - 1980 (89 years)

Clive Harcourt Carruthers was a Canadian classicist. Carruthers attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1916. He served in the Canadian Army, briefly taught at the University of Alberta, and, in 1921, started teaching at McGill University in Montreal. From 1929–1950 he served as professor of classical philology; in 1950 he became department chairman; and from 1950–1961 he was Hiram Mills professor of classics.

#9343

Viggo Brøndal

1887 - 1942 (55 years)

Rasmus Viggo Brøndal was a Danish philologist and professor of Romance languages and literature at Copenhagen University. He was also a founder of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Background Danish linguist and language philosopher. Brøndal received a traditional education in philology but showed an early concern for theoretical problems. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding introduced him to the theory and history of philosophical categories, which was to be the basis of his theory of structural linguistics. This background made him receptive to the ideas of the prestructuralists during his studies in Paris .

#9344

Michael de la Bédoyère

1900 - 1973 (73 years)

Count Michael Anthony Maurice de la Bédoyère was an English writer, editor and journalist. Life He was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and took a first in "Modern Greats" at Campion Hall, Oxford University. His initial plans to become a Jesuit priest were abandoned. In 1930-1931 he lectured at the University of Minnesota. In 1934 he became editor of the Catholic Herald, a post he held until 1962. During this time he transformed it from one of limited regional appeal into a more challenging and intellectual newspaper, which often brought it into conflict with the more conservative members of the Roman Catholic Church.

#9345

G. M. Hirst

1869 - 1962 (93 years)

Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.

#9346

William K. Wimsatt

1907 - 1975 (68 years)

William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to question the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.

#9347

Thomas Parry

1904 - 1985 (81 years)

Sir Thomas Parry FBA was a Welsh writer and academic. He was Professor of Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor from 1947 to 1953, Librarian of the National Library of Wales from 1953 to 1958, Principal of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth from 1958 to 1969 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1961 to 1963 and 1967 to 1969.

#9348

Péter Szondi

1929 - 1971 (42 years)

Péter Szondi was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary. Biography Szondi's father was the Hungarian-Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi, who settled in Switzerland after his 1944 release after five months in Bergen-Belsen.

#9349

Bertha Harmer

1885 - 1934 (49 years)

Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.

#9350

Joseph Edward Harry

1863 - 1949 (86 years)

Joseph Edward Harry briefly served an interim term as president of the University of Cincinnati between Presidents Howard Ayers and Charles W. Dabney in 1904. Harry was dean of the college of Arts and Sciences from 1901 to 1906 and was dean of the Graduate School in 1916.

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