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,
#9501
Arthur Wing Pinero
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright and, early in his career, actor. Pinero was drawn to the theatre from an early age, and became a professional actor at the age of 19. He gained experience as a supporting actor in British provincial theatres, and from 1876 to 1881 was a member of Henry Irving's company, based at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
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Johannes Trithemius
1462 - 1516 (54 years)
Johannes Trithemius , born Johann Heidenberg, was a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath who was active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and occultist. He is considered the founder of modern cryptography and steganography, as well as the founder of bibliography and literary studies as branches of knowledge. He had considerable influence on the development of early modern and modern occultism. His students included Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus.
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Thomas Otway
1652 - 1685 (33 years)
Thomas Otway was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd . Life Otway was born at Trotton near Midhurst, the parish of which his father, Humphrey Otway, was at that time curate. Humphrey later became rector of Woolbeding, a neighbouring parish, where Thomas Otway was brought up and expected to commit to priesthood. He was educated at Winchester College, and in 1669 entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner, but left the university without a degree in the autumn of 1672. At Oxford he made the acquaintance of Anthony Cary, 5th Vis...
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Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
1867 - 1928 (61 years)
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a journalist, politician and bestselling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films that were adapted from his works.
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Édouard Schuré
1841 - 1929 (88 years)
Eduard Schuré was a French philosopher, poet, playwright, novelist, music critic, and publicist of esoteric literature. Biography Schuré was the son of a doctor in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg, who died when Édouard was fourteen years old. Schuré mastered French as well as German, and was influenced by German and French culture in his formative years. He received his degree in law at the University of Strasbourg, but he never entered into practice. Schuré called the three most significant of his friendships those with Richard Wagner, Marguerita Albana Mignaty and Rudolf Steiner.
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Juan Andrés
1740 - 1817 (77 years)
Juan Andrés y Morell was a Spanish Jesuit priest, Christian humanist and literary critic of the Age of Enlightenment. He was the creator of world history and comparative literature through the most important and extensive of his works: Dell'Origine, progressi e stato d'ogni attuale letteratura – Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura only recently restored to a critical and complete edition. He is one of the most important authors, together with Lorenzo Hervás, Antonio Eximeno, Francisco Javier Clavijero or Celestino Mutis, of the Spanish Universalist School of the 18th ce...
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Thomas MacDonagh
1878 - 1916 (38 years)
Thomas Stanislaus MacDonagh was an Irish political activist, poet, playwright, educationalist and revolutionary leader. He was one of the seven leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916, a signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and Commandant of the 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, which fought in Jacob's biscuit factory. He was executed for his part in the Rising at the age of thirty-eight.
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Lewis Richard Farnell
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
Lewis Richard Farnell FBA was a classical scholar and Oxford academic, where he served as Vice-Chancellor from 1920 to 1923. Early life and career Lewis Farnell was born in Salisbury, southern England, in 1856. He was educated at the City of London School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first class degree in Literae Humaniores in 1878. He was elected as a Fellow of Exeter College in 1880 and a lecturer in classics in 1883. He was later Rector of the College.
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Harold H. Bender
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Harold Herman Bender was an American philologist who taught for more than forty years at Princeton University, where he served as chair of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature. He was the chief etymologist for Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
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János Garay
1812 - 1853 (41 years)
János Garay was a Hungarian poet and author, born in Szekszárd, Tolna County. From 1823 to 1828 he studied at Pécs, and subsequently, in 1829, at the University of Pest. In 1834 he brought out an heroic poem, in hexameters, under the title Csatár. Garay was an energetic journalist, and in 1838 he moved to Pozsony, where he edited the political journal Hírnök . He returned to Pest in 1839, when he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1842 he was admitted into the Kisfaludy Society, of which he became second secretary.
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Xu Zhimo
1897 - 1931 (34 years)
Xu Zhimo was a Chinese romantic poet and writer of modern Chinese poetry who strove to loosen Chinese poetry from its traditional forms and to reshape it under the influences of Western poetry and the vernacular Chinese language. He died in a plane crash.
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Gladys Mitchell
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell was an English writer best known for her creation of Mrs Bradley, the heroine of 66 detective novels. She also wrote under the pseudonyms Stephen Hockaby and Malcolm Torrie. Fêted during her life , her work has been largely neglected in the decades since her death.
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D. H. Lawrence
1885 - 1930 (45 years)
David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Several of his novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of sexuality and use of explicit language.
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Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern
1770 - 1852 (82 years)
Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern was a German philologist in Livonia, the first director of the library of the Imperial University of Dorpat. He coined the term Bildungsroman. Biography Morgenstern was born in Magdeburg. He studied at the University of Halle under Johann August Eberhard in philosophy and Friedrich August Wolf in philology.
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Patras Bokhari
1898 - 1958 (60 years)
Syed Ahmed Shah , commonly known as Patras Bokhari , was a Pakistani humorist, writer, broadcaster and diplomat who served as a Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. Born in Peshawar, British India to a Kashmiri family, Shah studied at Edwardes Mission School in Peshawar and moved to Lahore where he studied English literature at the Government College. Shah moved to United Kingdom where he received his Tripos from the Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He returned to Lahore where he taught English at Government College in 1927. He became a prominent part of the Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia.
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Joaquin Miller
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Cincinnatus Heine Miller , better known by his pen name Joaquin Miller , was an American poet, author, and frontiersman. He is nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras" after the Sierra Nevada, about which he wrote in his Songs of the Sierras .
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Austin App
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Austin Joseph App was an American professor of medieval English literature who taught at the University of Scranton and La Salle University. App defended Nazi Germany during World War II. He is known for his work denying the Holocaust, and he has been called the first major American Holocaust denier.
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Mihai Beniuc
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Mihai Beniuc was a Romanian socialist realist poet, dramatist, and novelist. He was born in 1907 in Sebiș, Arad County , and attended the Moise Nicoară High School in Arad. In 1931 he graduated from the University of Cluj, majoring in psychology, philosophy and sociology. This was reflected in his writing, particularly in his novels. At the end of World War II, he joined the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Cluj.
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Johannes Scherr
1817 - 1886 (69 years)
Johannes Scherr was a German-born cultural historian, writer, literary critic, educator and politician who spent most of his working life in Switzerland. Biography Scherr was born in Hohenrechberg , Württemberg on October 1817. After studying philosophy and history at the University of Tübingen , he became master in a school conducted by his brother Thomas in Winterthur. In 1843 he moved to Stuttgart, and, entering the political arena with a pamphlet Württemberg im Jahr 1843, was elected in 1848 a member of the Württemberg House of Deputies; became leader of the democratic party in south Germ...
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Kenneth Patchen
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
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Richard Brautigan
1935 - 1984 (49 years)
Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. A prolific writer, he wrote throughout his life and published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and four books of poetry. Brautigan's work has been published both in the United States and internationally throughout Europe, Japan, and China. He is best known for his novels Trout Fishing in America , In Watermelon Sugar , and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 .
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Howard Pyle
1853 - 1911 (58 years)
Howard Pyle was an American illustrator, painter, and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.
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Thomas Wyatt
1503 - 1542 (39 years)
Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature. He was born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent, though the family was originally from Yorkshire. His family adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. His mother was Anne Skinner, and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a Privy Councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509.
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James Planché
1796 - 1880 (84 years)
James Robinson Planché was a British dramatist, antiquary and officer of arms. Over a period of approximately 60 years he wrote, adapted, or collaborated on 176 plays in a wide range of genres including extravaganza, farce, comedy, burletta, melodrama and opera. Planché was responsible for introducing historically accurate costume into nineteenth century British theatre, and subsequently became an acknowledged expert on historical costume, publishing a number of works on the topic.
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Jean Mabillon
1632 - 1707 (75 years)
Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., was a French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. He is considered the founder of the disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. Early life Mabillon was born in the town of Saint-Pierremont, then in the ancient Province of Champagne, now a part of the Department of Ardennes. He was the son of Estienne Mabillon and his wife Jeanne Guérin. At the age of 12 he became a pupil at the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims. Having entered the seminary in 1650, he left after three years and in 1653 became instead a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi.
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Douglas Bush
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
John Nash Douglas Bush was a literary critic and literary historian. He taught for most of his life at Harvard University, where his students included many of the most prominent scholars, writers, and academics of several generations, including Walter Jackson Bate, Neil Rudenstine, Paul Auster and Aharon Lichtenstein. Students from the 60's report that Bush would sometimes speak in decasyllables, so that it was hard to tell where his recitation of Milton left off and where his commentary began.
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William Dunbar
1460 - 1520 (60 years)
William Dunbar was a Scottish makar, or court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was closely associated with the court of King James IV and produced a large body of work in Scots distinguished by its great variation in themes and literary styles. He was probably a native of East Lothian, as assumed from a satirical reference in The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie. His surname is also spelt Dumbar.
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George Webbe Dasent
1817 - 1896 (79 years)
Sir George Webbe Dasent, D. C. L. was a British lawyer, translator of folk tales and contributor to The Times. Life Dasent was born 22 May 1817 at St. Vincent, British West Indies, the son of the attorney general, John Roche Dasent. His mother was the second wife of his father; Charlotte Martha was the daughter of Captain Alexander Burrowes Irwin.
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James Wright
1927 - 1980 (53 years)
James Arlington Wright was an American poet. Life James Wright was born and spent his childhood in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked in a glass factory, and his mother in a laundry. Neither parent had received more than an eighth grade education. Wright suffered a nervous breakdown in 1943, and he graduated a year late from high school, in 1946.
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Nahum Tate
1652 - 1715 (63 years)
Nahum Tate was an Anglo-Irish poet, hymnist and lyricist, who became Poet Laureate in 1692. Tate is best known for The History of King Lear, his 1681 adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, and for his libretto for Henry Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas.
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Thomas Dekker
1572 - 1632 (60 years)
Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.
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Sándor Kőrösi Csoma
1784 - 1842 (58 years)
Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was a Hungarian philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning "the foreign pupil", and was declared a bosatsu or bodhisattva by the Japanese in 1933. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His birth date is often given as 4 April, although this is actually his baptism day and the year of his birth is debated by some authors who put it at 1787 or 1788 rather than 1784. The Magyar ethnic group, the Székelys, to which he belonged believed that they were derived from a branch of Attila's Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century.
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Zhu Ziqing
1898 - 1948 (50 years)
Zhu Ziqing , born Zhu Zihua, was a renowned Chinese poet and essayist. Zhu studied at Peking University, and during the May Fourth Movement became one of several pioneers of modernism in China during the 1920s. Zhu was a prolific writer of both prose and poetry, but is best known for essays like "Retreating Figure" , and "You. Me." . His best known work in verse is the long poem "Destruction" or Huimie .
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Sara Teasdale
1884 - 1933 (49 years)
Sara Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914. In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.
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John William Mackail
1859 - 1945 (86 years)
John William Mackail was a Scottish academic of Oxford University and reformer of the British education system. He is most often remembered as a scholar of Virgil and as the official biographer of the socialist artist William Morris, of whom he was a friend.
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Margaret Wise Brown
1910 - 1952 (42 years)
Margaret Wise Brown was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.
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Epicharmus of Kos
524 BC - 435 BC (89 years)
Epicharmus of Kos or Epicharmus Comicus or Epicharmus Comicus Syracusanus , thought to have lived between c. 550 and c. 460 BC, was a Greek dramatist and philosopher who is often credited with being one of the first comic writers, having originated the Doric or Sicilian comedic form.
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Numa Pompilio Llona
1832 - 1907 (75 years)
Numa Pompilio Llona Echeverri was an Ecuadorian poet, journalist, educator, diplomat, and philosopher. Numa Pompilio Llona was widely read in his time, but today he is mostly forgotten. Biography His father was the Ecuadorian lawyer Dr. Manuel Leocadio de Llona y Rivera, and his mother was Mercedes Echeverri Llados from Colombia. Born in Guayaquil, Numa Pompilio Llona completed primary school in Cali, Colombia, and completed secondary school in Lima, Peru. He received a law degree at the Universidad San Marcoss in Lima, Peru.
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Gaston Leroux
1868 - 1927 (59 years)
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical. His 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.
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James Jones
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
James Ramon Jones was an American novelist known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath. He won the 1952 National Book Award for his first published novel, From Here to Eternity, which was adapted for the big screen immediately and made into a television series a generation later.
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Volodymyr Sosiura
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Volodymyr Mikolayovich Sosiura was a Ukrainian lyric poet, writer, veteran of the Russian Civil War . Brief biography Volodymyr Sosiura was born in a settlement of Debaltseve train station . He started to work in 1909 at the Donets Soda Factory in a settlement Verkhnee where he worked for couple of years. In 1914–1918 he studied in an agricultural school in a settlement of Yama train station . In 1918 Sosiura was a member of the Donets Soda Factory insurgent workers group.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Anne Bradstreet
1612 - 1672 (60 years)
Anne Bradstreet was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.
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Sigurður Nordal
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Sigurður Nordal was an Icelandic scholar, writer, and ambassador. He was influential in forming the theory of the Icelandic sagas as works of literature composed by individual authors. Education Nordal studied Scandinavian Philology in Copenhagen where he received his MA in 1912. In 1914 he completed his doctoral thesis. He then went on to study philosophy in Berlin and Oxford.
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Henry Reynolds
1564 - 1632 (68 years)
Henry Reynolds was an English schoolmaster poet and literary critic of the seventeenth century. Born in Suffolk, he is known for two works: Aminta Englisht of 1628, a translation from Tasso, and Mythomystes, a 1632 critical work on poetry considered to be most influenced by the Neoplatonism of the early Italian Renaissance. He was the dedicatee of a 1627 poem by Michael Drayton.
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Francis Darwin
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Sir Francis Darwin was a British botanist. He was the third son of the naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin. Biography Francis Darwin was born in Down House, Downe, Kent in 1848. He was the third son and seventh child of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood. He was educated at Clapham Grammar School.
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Wilhelm Viëtor
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Carl Adolf Theodor Wilhelm Viëtor was a German phonetician and language educator. He was a central figure in the Reform Movement in language education of the late 19th century, which sought to replace the traditional grammar–translation method with oral language teaching.
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Henry Olsson
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Karl Henry Olsson was a Swedish literary scholar. He was Professor of literary history and poetics at Stockholm University and a member of the Swedish Academy. Early life Olsson was born in Köla parish, present-day Eda Municipality in the westernmost part of Värmland. After finishing his schooling in Karlstad he became a student at Uppsala university in 1914, and studied literature, especially poetry, for Henrik Schück, Martin Lamm, and Anton Blanck. He received a BA degree in 1918, a licentiate in 1921 and an MA in 1924.
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Georges Bernanos
1888 - 1948 (60 years)
Louis Émile Clément Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. A Catholic with monarchist leanings, he was critical of elitist thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism. He believed this had led to France's defeat and eventual occupation by Germany in 1940 during World War II. His two major novels Sous le soleil de Satan and the Journal d'un curé de campagne both revolve around a parish priest who combats evil and despair in the world. Most of his novels have been translated into English and frequently published in both Great Britain and the United ...
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Edwin Arnold
1832 - 1904 (72 years)
Sir Edwin Arnold KCIE CSI was an English poet and journalist, who is most known for his work The Light of Asia. Biography Arnold was born at Gravesend, Kent, the second son of a Sussex magistrate, Robert Coles Arnold. He grew up at Southchurch Wick, a farm in Southchurch, Essex, and was educated at King's School, Rochester; King's College London; and University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize for poetry on the subject of "The Feast of Belshazzar" in 1852. He became a schoolmaster, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and in 1856 went to India as Principal of the Deccan Coll...
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