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,
#9351
Du Fu
712 - 770 (58 years)
Du Fu was a Chinese poet and politician during the Tang dynasty. Along with his elder contemporary and friend Li Bai , he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and his last 15 years were a time of almost constant unrest.
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Carl Van Vechten
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people. Although he was married to women for most of his adult years, Van Vechten engaged in numerous homosexual affairs over his lifetime.
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Giovanni Boccaccio
1313 - 1375 (62 years)
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was sometimes simply known as "the Certaldese" and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism...
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William Morris
1834 - 1896 (62 years)
William Morris was a British textile designer, poet, artist, fantasy writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.
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Ambrose Bierce
1842 - 1914 (72 years)
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was named by the Grolier Club one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.
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August Strindberg
1849 - 1912 (63 years)
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806 - 1861 (55 years)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English.
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Raymond Williams
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
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Nizami Ganjavi
1141 - 1209 (68 years)
Nizami Ganjavi , Nizami Ganje'i, Nizami, or Nezāmi, whose formal name was Jamal ad-Dīn Abū Muḥammad Ilyās ibn-Yūsuf ibn-Zakkī, was a 12th-century Muslim poet. Nezāmi is considered the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature, who brought a colloquial and realistic style to the Persian epic. His heritage is widely appreciated and shared by Afghanistan, Republic of Azerbaijan, Iran, the Kurdistan region and Tajikistan.
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Macrobius
370 - 430 (60 years)
Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, usually referred to as Macrobius , was a Roman provincial who lived during the early fifth century, during late antiquity, the period of time corresponding to the Later Roman Empire, and when Latin was as widespread as Greek among the elite. He is primarily known for his writings, which include the widely copied and read Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis about Somnium Scipionis, which was one of the most important sources for Neoplatonism in the Latin West during the Middle Ages; the Saturnalia, a compendium of ancient Roman religious and antiquarian lore; and De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique verbi , which is now lost.
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Gerhart Hauptmann
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism, though he integrated other styles into his work as well. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.
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Walter Benjamin
1892 - 1940 (48 years)
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher ...
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Propertius
47 BC - 16 BC (31 years)
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC. Propertius' surviving work comprises four books of Elegies . He was a friend of the poets Gallus and Virgil and, with them, had as his patron Maecenas and, through Maecenas, the emperor Augustus. Although Propertius was not as renowned in his own time as other Latin elegists, he is today regarded by scholars as a major poet.
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Arthur Symons
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
Arthur William Symons was a British poet, critic and magazine editor. Life Born in Milford Haven, Wales, to Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 1884–1886, he edited four of Bernard Quaritch's Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and in 1888–1889 seven plays of the "Henry Irving" Shakespeare. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894, but his major editorial feat was his work with the short-lived Savoy.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson
1823 - 1911 (88 years)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, politician, and soldier. He was active in abolitionism in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864. Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples.
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Felice Romani
1788 - 1865 (77 years)
Giuseppe Felice Romani was an Italian poet and scholar of literature and mythology who wrote many librettos for the opera composers Donizetti and Bellini. Romani was considered the finest Italian librettist between Metastasio and Boito.
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Kenneth Tynan
1927 - 1980 (53 years)
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at The Observer, he praised John Osborne's Look Back in Anger , and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent. In 1963, Tynan was appointed as the new National Theatre Company's literary manager.
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Max Eastman
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.
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Bing Xin
1900 - 1999 (99 years)
Xie Wanying , better known by her pen name Bing Xin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bing Xin carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Changling.
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Ivan Franko
1856 - 1916 (60 years)
Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.
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John Gay
1685 - 1732 (47 years)
John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.
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Ivo Andrić
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Ivo Andrić was a Yugoslav novelist, poet and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under Ottoman rule. Born in Travnik in Austria-Hungary, modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Andrić attended high school in Sarajevo, where he became an active member of several South Slav national youth organizations. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Andrić was arrested and imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian police, who suspected his involvement in the plot. As the authorities were unable to ...
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Kenneth Rexroth
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon
1802 - 1838 (36 years)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.
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Tudor Arghezi
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Ion Nae Theodorescu was a Romanian writer who wrote under the pen name Tudor Arghezi Biography Early life He graduated from Saint Sava High School in October 1896, started working to pay for his studies, and made his debut in 1896, publishing verses in Alexandru Macedonski's magazine Liga Ortodoxă under the name Ion Theo. Soon after, Macedonski, the herald of Romanian Symbolism, publicized his praise for the young poet: "This young man, at an age when I was still prattling verses, with an audacity that knows no boundaries, but not yet crowned by the most glittering success, parts with the ...
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Marina Tsvetaeva
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed.
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John Herschel
1792 - 1871 (79 years)
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.
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Oskar Kokoschka
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.
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C. S. Forester
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Cecil Louis Troughton Smith , known by his pen name Cecil Scott "C. S." Forester, was an English novelist known for writing tales of naval warfare, such as the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars.
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Lady Gregory
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
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Marquis de Sade
1740 - 1814 (74 years)
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade , was a French writer, libertine, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.
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Mark Van Doren
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City , and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.
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George Moore
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
George Augustus Moore was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day.
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Archibald MacLeish
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was award...
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Heinrich Böll
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Heinrich Theodor Böll was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers, Böll is a recipient of the Georg Büchner Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature . Biography Böll was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Roman Catholic and pacifist family that later opposed the rise of Nazism. Böll refused to join the Hitler Youth during the 1930s. He was apprenticed to a bookseller before studying German studies and classics at the University of Cologne.
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Max Jacob
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. Life and career After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend . Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916.
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Jorge Guillén
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Jorge Guillén Álvarez was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, a university teacher, a scholar and a literary critic. In 1957-1958, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, which were published in 1961 under the title Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain. The final lecture was a tribute to his colleagues in the Generation of '27. In 1983, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
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Whittaker Chambers
1901 - 1961 (60 years)
Whittaker Chambers was an American writer and intelligence agent. After early years as a Communist Party member and Soviet spy , he defected from the Soviet underground , worked for Time magazine , and then testified about the Ware Group in what became the Hiss case for perjury , often referred to as the trial of the century, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review . US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
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Nelson Algren
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Nelson Algren was an American writer. His 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name. Algren articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". Art Shay singled out a poem Algren wrote from the perspective of a "halfy," street slang for a legless man on wheels. Shay said that Algren considered this poem to be a key to everything he had ever written. The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap...
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Jovan Skerlić
1877 - 1914 (37 years)
Jovan Skerlić was a Serbian writer and literary critic. He is seen as one of the most influential Serbian literary critics of the early 20th century, after Bogdan Popović, his professor and early mentor.
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Chrétien de Troyes
1135 - 1181 (46 years)
Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects such as Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval and the Holy Grail. Chrétien's chivalric romances, including Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval and Yvain, represent some of the best-regarded works of medieval literature. His use of structure, particularly in Yvain, has been seen as a step towards the modern novel.
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Mary McCarthy
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Lewis Mumford
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology.
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Arthur Evans
1851 - 1941 (90 years)
Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on the structures and artifacts found there and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Evans found that he needed to distinguish the Minoan civilisation from Mycenaean Greece. Evans was also the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.
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Vyacheslav Ivanov
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian poet, playwright, and senior theorist of the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic. Early life Born in Moscow, Ivanov lost his father, a minor civil servant, when he was only five years old and was subsequently raised within the Russian Orthodox Church by his deeply religious mother. He graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a gold medal and entered Moscow University where he studied history and philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff. In 1886, he moved to Berlin University to study Classics, Roman law, and economics under Theodor Mommsen.
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Wolfram von Eschenbach
1170 - 1220 (50 years)
Wolfram von Eschenbach was a German knight, poet and composer, regarded as one of the greatest epic poets of medieval German literature. As a Minnesinger, he also wrote lyric poetry. Life Little is known of Wolfram's life. There are no historical documents which mention him, and his works are the sole source of evidence. In Parzival, he talks of wir Beier ; the dialect of his works is East Franconian. This and a number of geographical references have resulted in the present-day Wolframs-Eschenbach, until 1917 Obereschenbach, near Ansbach in present-day Bavaria, being officially designated as his birthplace.
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Robert Bridges
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Robert Seymour Bridges was a British poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns. It was through Bridges's efforts that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins achieved posthumous fame.
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Colette
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette , known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
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Algernon Blackwood
1869 - 1951 (82 years)
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".
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E. Nesbit
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
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