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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#951
Nicholas Schaffner
#14863
Overall Influence
1953 - 1991 (38 years)
Nicholas Schaffner was an American non-fiction author, journalist, and singer-songwriter. Biography Schaffner was born in Manhattan to John V. Schaffner , a literary agent whose clients included Ray Bradbury, and his wife Perdita Macpherson Schaffner . His maternal grandparents were the Imagist poet H.D., and the composer and music critic Cecil Gray. He attended the Choate School and the New College of Florida, graduating from both schools.
Go to Profile#952
David Leavitt
#10872
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David Leavitt is an American novelist, short story writer, and biographer. Biography Leavitt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Gloria and Harold Leavitt. Harold was a professor who taught at Stanford University and Gloria was a political activist. Leavitt grew up in Palo Alto, California, and graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in English in 1983. After his first book's success, he spent much of the 1990s living in Italy working and restoring an old house in Semproniano in Tuscany with his partner. He has also taught at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#953
Amadou Koné
#11748
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Amadou Koné is a writer from Cote d'Ivoire. Childhood He is the son of Soma Denbie and Kahou Sirima . Amadou Koné was born in May 1953 in the small village of Tangora in the circle of Banfora, today Burkina Faso. Grandson of Dan Kalmo whose big brother, the legendary warlord Fanhikroi, an opponent of colonial rule, was assassinated on the road leading from Banfora to Bobo Dioulasso, Amadou Kone learn very early sense of honor by his father who, exasperated by the abuses of the French settlers and the new leaders in their pay, chose to immigrate to the Ayamé region Basse, Côte d'Ivoire, where...
Go to Profile#954
John Kenneth Muir
#21556
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
John Kenneth Muir is an American literary critic. As of 2022, he has written thirty reference books in the fields of film and television, with a particular focus on the horror and science fiction genres.
Go to Profile#955
Douglas Preston
#6943
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child , he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
Go to Profile#956
Espen Aarseth
#26568
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Espen J. Aarseth is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor.
Go to Profile#957
Francisco Ayala
#12453
Overall Influence
1906 - 2009 (103 years)
Francisco Ayala García-Duarte was a Spanish writer, the last representative of the Generation of '27. Biography He was born on 16 March 1906 in Granada. At the age of 16 he went to Madrid, where he studied Law and Humanities. During those years he published his first two novels, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu and Historia de un amanecer .
Go to Profile#958
John Crowley
#13423
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction. He has also written essays. Crowley studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer.
Go to Profile#959
Ellen Gilchrist
#19643
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ellen Gilchrist is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan. Life Gilchrist was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a plantation owned by her maternal grandparents. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and studied creative writing under renowned writer Eudora Welty at Millsaps College. Later in life, Gilchrist enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, but she never completed her MFA. Gilchrist has been married and divorced four times and has three children, fourteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Go to Profile#960
Ahmed Sharif
#18946
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Ahmed Sharif was an educationist, philosopher, critic, writer and scholar of medieval Bengali literature. He is recognized as one of the most outspoken atheist and radical thinkers of Bangladesh. Background Sharif was born on 13 February 1921 in Patiya, Chittagong District. His father was Abdul Aziz and his uncle was Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad, a prominent historian of Bangla literature. He did his master's and Ph.D. degrees in Bengali literature from the University of Dhaka, in 1944 and 1967 respectively. From 1945 to 1949, he taught at Laksham Nawab Faizunnessa College and later on at Feni College.
Go to Profile#961
Yoshikichi Furui
#30020
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Yoshikichi Furui was a Japanese author and translator. He has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary awards. Biography Furui was born in Tokyo, Japan. He was educated at the University of Tokyo, where he majored in German literature, receiving a BA in 1960. His undergraduate thesis was on Franz Kafka. He remained at Tokyo University for graduate work for another two years, earning an MA in German literature in 1962. After graduating, he accepted a position at Kanazawa University where he taught German language and literature for three years. He...
Go to Profile#962
Claudia Durst Johnson
#17100
Overall Influence
Claudia Durst Johnson is a literary scholar best known for her work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing the idea of the novel's gothicism and gothic satire. In the process of her research she befriended the author, Harper Lee. When the city of Chicago organized a One City One Book program in 2001 based on To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was unavailable to speak, so Johnson was invited to Chicago to present the book to the city.
Go to Profile#963
Meena Alexander
#12303
Overall Influence
1951 - 2018 (67 years)
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#964
Bob Perelman
#24304
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", according to one of his chroniclers. Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#965
Masood Ashraf Raja
#11632
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Masood Ashraf Raja is a Pakistani-born American writer. Previously, he was an associate professor of postcolonial literature and theory at the University of North Texas. He is also the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, an open access journal that he founded in 2009.
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Ken Saro-Wiwa
#4459
Overall Influence
1941 - 1995 (54 years)
Kenule Beeson "Ken" Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and has suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping.
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George Bowering
#18111
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He was born in Penticton, British Columbia, and raised in the nearby town of Oliver, where his father was a high-school chemistry teacher. Bowering is author of more than 100 books.
Go to Profile#968
Janice Radway
#19940
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janice Radway is an American literary and cultural studies scholar. Education Radway holds a BA from Michigan State University, 1971, and an MA from State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1972. She earned her PhD from Michigan State University 1977 with the dissertation A Phenomenological Theory of Popular and Elite Literature. She taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Literature Program at Duke University. She served as an editor of American Quarterly, and, in 1998–99, as president of the American Studies Association. In 2008, she became Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#969
Simon Stephens
#9755
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Simon Stephens is a British-Irish playwright and Professor of Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having taught on the Young Writers' Programme at the Royal Court Theatre for many years, he is now an Artistic Associate at the Lyric Hammersmith. He is the inaugural Associate Playwright of Steep Theatre Company, Chicago, where four of his plays, Harper Regan, Motortown, Wastwater, and Birdland had their U.S. premieres. His writing is widely performed throughout Europe and, along with Dennis Kelly and Martin Crimp, he is one of the most performed English-language writers in Germ...
Go to Profile#970
Ibn Warraq
#8307
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism. Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.
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Billy Wilder
#6879
Overall Influence
1906 - 2002 (96 years)
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born filmmaker. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards , a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.
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Masahiko Shimada
#23517
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Masahiko Shimada is a Japanese writer. He has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Itō Sei Literature Prize, and the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award. His work has been translated into English.
Go to Profile#973
Margo Jefferson
#20497
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic. Biography Jefferson received her B.A. from Brandeis University, where she graduated cum laude, and her M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became an associate editor at Newsweek in 1973 and stayed at the magazine until 1978. She then served as an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University from 1979 to 1983 and from 1989 to 1991. Since then she has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she is now professor of professional practice in writing.
Go to Profile#974
Cheryl Wall
#33144
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Cheryl A. Wall was a literary critic and professor of English at Rutgers University. One of the first black women to head an English department at a major research university, she worked for diversity in the literary canon as well as in the classroom. She specialized in black women's writing, particularly the Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston. She edited several volumes of Hurston's writings for the Library of America. She was also a section editor for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and was on the editorial boards of American Literature, African American Review and Signs.
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Hans-Jörg Uther
#23698
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Hans-Jörg Uther is a German literary scholar and folklorist. Biography Uther studied Folklore, Germanistik and History between 1969 and 1970 at the University of Munich and between 1970 and 1973 at the University of Göttingen. In his last academic year, he passed the first state examination for teaching at grammar schools. In 1971, he began a period of over 40 years working on the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, initially as a student assistant, from 1973 as an editor. In 1980 he became a PhD with the Dissertation "Behinderte in populären Erzählungen" in Göttingen.
Go to Profile#976
Kei Nakazawa
#30662
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kei Nakazawa is the professional name of Emiko Honda, a Japanese writer and professor. Nakazawa has won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers and the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and two of her novels have been adapted for film. Since 2005 she has been a professor of literature at Hosei University.
Go to Profile#977
Salvador Elizondo
#14559
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Salvador Elizondo Alcalde was a Mexican writer of the 60s Generation of Mexican literature. Regarded as one of the creators of the most influential cult noirè, experimental, intelligent style literature in Latin America, he wrote as a novelist, poet, critic, playwright, and journalist. His most famous novels are Farabeuf and El hipogeo Secreto . He is also known for El grafógrafo which is a series of short texts based on linguistic abbreviatory experimentation. Farabeuf was published in English by Ox & Pigeon in 2015.
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Harold B. Segel
#21329
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Harold Bernard Segel was professor emeritus of Slavic literatures and of comparative literature at Columbia University. Segel was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston Latin School. He majored in Modern Languages at Boston College and did graduate work at Harvard University .
Go to Profile#979
Aamer Hussein
#23176
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Aamer Hussein is a Pakistani critic and short story writer Early life and education Hussein grew up in Karachi, where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother's family in India. He studied in Ooty, South India, for two years before moving to London in 1970. Hussein is fluent in seven languages: English, Urdu, Hindi, French, Italian, Spanish and Persian.
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Raymond Federman
#14104
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest r...
Go to Profile#981
Charles Baxter
#11812
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Charles Morley Baxter is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Biography Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul in 1969. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West.
Go to Profile#982
Lynn Nottage
#5305
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
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Dennis Brutus
#15644
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Dennis Vincent Brutus was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games due to its racial policy of apartheid.
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William Irwin Thompson
#4096
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.
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Jewelle Gomez
#19064
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jewelle Lydia Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. She lived in New York City for 22 years, working in public television, theater, as well as philanthropy, before relocating to the West Coast. Her writing—fiction, poetry, essays and cultural criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of outlets, both feminist and mainstream. Her work centers on women's experiences, particularly those of LGBTQ women of color. She has been interviewed for several documentaries focused on LGBT rights and culture.
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Pierre Boulle
#8864
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Pierre François Marie Louis Boulle was a French author. He is best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes , that were both made into award-winning films. Boulle was an engineer serving as a secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, when he was captured and subjected to two years' forced labour. He used these experiences in The Bridge over the River Kwai, about the notorious Death Railway, which became an international bestseller. The film, named The Bridge on the River Kwai, by David Lean won seven Oscars, and Boulle was credited with writing the scr...
Go to Profile#987
Lucy Sante
#11021
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York . Biography Born in Verviers, Belgium, Sante migrated to the United States in the early 1960s. She attended school in New York City, first at Regis High School in Manhattan and later at Columbia University from 1972 to 1976; due to several incompletes and outstanding library fines, she did not take a degree. Since 1984 she has been a full-time writer. Sante worked in the mailroom and then as assistant to editor Barbara Epstein at The New York Review of Books.
Go to Profile#988
A. R. Gurney
#7010
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. was an American playwright, novelist and academic. Gurney is known for plays including The Dining Room , Sweet Sue , The Cocktail Hour , and for his Pulitzer Prize nominated play Love Letters . His series of plays about upper-class WASP life in contemporary America have been called "penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat."
Go to Profile#989
Lynn Ahrens
#7707
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lynn Ahrens is an American songwriter, and librettist for the musical theatre, television and film. She has collaborated with Stephen Flaherty for many years. She won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for the Broadway musical Ragtime. Together with Flaherty, she has written many musicals, including Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Ragtime, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, The Glorious Ones, Rocky, Little Dancer and, recently on Broadway, Anastasia and Once on This Island.
Go to Profile#990
Scott M. Gimple
#22477
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Scott M. Gimple is an American writer for both comics and television. He is known for his work as a writer and producer for Fillmore!, Life, FlashForward, Chase, and The Walking Dead, and served as showrunner for The Walking Dead from seasons 4 through 8.
Go to Profile#991
Karl Edward Wagner
#19798
Overall Influence
1945 - 1994 (49 years)
Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and originally trained as a psychiatrist. He wrote numerous dark fantasy and horror stories. As an editor, he created a three-volume set of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian fiction restored to its original form as written, and edited the long-running and genre-defining The Year's Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books. His Carcosa publishing company issued four volumes of the best stories by some of the major authors of the so-called Golden Age pulp magazines.
Go to Profile#992
Anselm Hollo
#21931
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo was a Finnish poet and translator. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death in January 2013. Hollo published more than forty titles of poetry in the United Kingdom and in the United States, with a style strongly influenced by the American beat poets.
Go to Profile#993
James Park Sloan
#22057
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
James Park Sloan is an American author, critic, and academic. He was a Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was educated at Harvard University, designed a course in 'Western Values' for the Harvard Business School and served in the Vietnam War as a paratrooper.
Go to Profile#994
Gideon Toury
#17275
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Gideon Toury was an Israeli translation scholar and professor of Poetics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he held the M. Bernstein Chair of Translation Theory. Gideon Toury was a pioneer of Descriptive Translation Studies.
Go to Profile#995
Andrew Milner
#9338
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andrew John Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
Go to Profile#996
Andrew M. Butler
#16373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andrew M. Butler is a British academic who teaches film, media and cultural studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is a former editor of Vector, the Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association and was membership secretary of the Science Fiction Foundation. He is a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and is now a member of the Serendip Foundation which administers the award.
Go to Profile#997
Morris Dickstein
#17623
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Morris Dickstein was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
Go to Profile#998
João Gilberto Noll
#22377
Overall Influence
1946 - 2017 (71 years)
João Gilberto Noll was a Brazilian writer, born in Porto Alegre, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS , but in 1969 interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970, Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copy editor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última...
Go to Profile#999
Makarand Paranjape
#15384
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Makarand R. Paranjape is an Indian novelist, poet, a former Director at Indian Institute of Advanced Study , Shimla and, since 1999, a Professor of English in the Centre for English Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Go to Profile#1000
Mike Royko
#5119
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Michael Royko Jr. was an American newspaper columnist from Chicago. Over his 30-year career, he wrote over 7,500 daily columns for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. A humorist who focused on life in Chicago, he was the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
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