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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#9601
W. Cabell Greet
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
William Cabell Greet was an American philologist and a professor of English. He graduated as valedictorian with a bachelor's degree in 1920 from Sewanee's University of the South. In the early 1920s he was an instructor at the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, and the University of California. At Columbia University he graduated with M.A. in 1924 and Ph.D. in 1926. He joined Barnard College's faculty in 1926, was appointed McIntosh Professor of English in 1953, and was department chair until he became professor emeritus in 1966.
Go to Profile#9602
Johannes Hoops
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Johannes Hoops was a German philologist who was Professor of English philology at the University of Heidelberg. He is best known as the publisher of the first edition of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde .
Go to Profile#9603
Allan Seager
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Allan Seager was an American novelist and short story writer based in Michigan. His stories were published in such leading magazines as The New Yorker and Esquire. He also taught creative writing to generations of students at the University of Michigan from 1935 to 1968.
Go to Profile#9604
Ajit Dutta
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Ajit Kumar Dutta, known as Ajit Dutta, was a prominent Bengali poet, writer, essayist and professor. Early life Ajit Dutta passed the entrance examination from Kishorilal Jubilee School in Dhaka in 1924 and was admitted to the Jagannath College . After passing the Higher Secondary, he moved to Calcutta in 1926 and was admitted to Vidyasagar College with Honors in English. But within a few days, after the death of his elder brother, he returned to Dhaka and was admitted in the Bangla and Sanskrit department of Dhaka University. Ajit Dutt placed first in first class in BA in 1926 and MA in 193...
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Silva Tipple New Lake
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Silva Tipple New Lake was an American classics professor, archaeologist, and scholar of the New Testament. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, for work on Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.
Go to Profile#9606
Josef Svennung
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Josef Gusten Algot Svennung was a Swedish classical philologist. He was Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Uppsala University from 1944 to 1961. Svennung is particularly known for his research on what Jordanes and other classical writers wrote about Scandza and the rest of Northern Europe.
Go to Profile#9607
Bernard Grebanier
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Bernard Grebanier was an American drama historian, critic, writer, theater director and poet, most notable for his studies of the works of William Shakespeare. He wrote music and 28 books. Career Grebanier was a professor of English at Brooklyn College from 1926 until 1964. He was a prolific critic during and after his academic career.
Go to Profile#9608
I. J. Kapstein
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Israel James "IJ" Kapstein was a novelist, professor, and Hebrew scholar at Brown University. Early life Israel James Kapstein was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With a childhood friend, S. J. Perelman, he attended Classical High School and Brown University. In college he wrote for the literary supplement of the Brown Daily Herald, contributed to the book review page of The Brown Jug, and was editor of Casements.
Go to Profile#9609
A. J. M. Smith
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism."
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Concha Meléndez
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dr. Concha Meléndez was an educator, poet, and writer. She was the first woman to belong to the Puerto Rican Academy of Languages. Early years Meléndez was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she received her primary and secondary education. After graduating from high school she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico where she earned her teacher's certificate.
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Flora Belle Ludington
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964. Life Born in Huron County, Michigan, Ludington moved to Wenatchee, Washington, as a young girl. At fourteen, she began her library career as a volunteer in the Carnegie public library in Wanatchee. She worked as an assistant in the University of Washington library, where she received a bachelor's degree in librarianship in 1920. She left Washington to be a reference librarian at Mills College, where she went on to study and receive a master's degree in history fin 1925.
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Jacques Ehrmann
1931 - 1972 (41 years)
Jacques Ehrmann was a French literary theorist and a faculty member of the Yale University French Department from 1961 until his death in 1972. Biography Jacques Ehrmann was born in Mulhouse on 31 March 1931, the son of Paul Ehrmann and Henriette Weber. Born in the Alsace region by a twist of fate, as both the Ehrmann and Weber families were originally from Alsace but had left after the 1871 loss to Germany, it just happened that Mulhouse, then Strasbourg, were the first assignments of his father, an Engineering graduate from "École Polytechnique".
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Jean Boutière
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Jean Boutière was a French philologist, and was a specialist in Romance philology. He was born in Mallemort, Bouches-du-Rhône in France. Jean Boutière was born 1 November 1898 in the area of the department Mallemort, Bouche-du-Rhone. After finishing high school in Marseille, he followed the facilty of letters to Aix and Toulouse, taking his license in philology in 1920. In the same year, Boutière became a professor at the French University Mission in Romania and taught the French language at Emanoil Gojdu University in Oradea, instead of Pascal Zigliara, who was transferred to Cluj. In Oradea...
Go to Profile#9614
Sten Bodvar Liljegren
1885 - 1984 (99 years)
Sten Bodvar Liljegren was a Swedish Anglist. He was born in Orrefors, Sweden. Liljegren was Professor of English Philology at the University of Greifswald between 1926 and 1930. He became a professor at Columbia University in New York and was appointed in 1931 as professor in Leipzig. He was appointed in 1939 as professor of English at the Uppsala University. He became emeritus in 1951.
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Ettore Bignone
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Ettore Bignone was an Italian classical philologist and man of letters. Early life and career Ettore Bignone was born to Carlo and Anita Matteucci. He graduated in Classical Literature in Turin, with a dissertation on Lucretius, in 1901 and in Philosophy in 1902. He then began his training as a teacher, from a gymnasium in Sicily at the Manzoni high school in Milan. He later joined the University of Pavia before Giuseppe Fraccaroli and Carlo Pascal.
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Walter Arthur Berendsohn
1884 - 1984 (100 years)
Walter Arthur Berendsohn was a German literary scholar. He was an active member of the Deutsche Liga fur Menschenrechte , a spinoff of the pacifist Bund Neues Vaterland, until 1933 when he fled for Sweden when the group was dissolved by Nazis.
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José Moreno Villa
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
José Moreno Villa was a Spanish poet and member of the Generation of '27. He was a man of many talents: narrator, essayist, literary critic, artist, painter, columnist, researcher, archivist, librarian and archaeologist. He also taught at universities in the United States and México.
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Giuseppe Prezzolini
1882 - 1982 (100 years)
Giuseppe Prezzolini was an Italian literary critic, journalist, editor and writer. He later became an American citizen. Biography Prezzolini was born in Perugia in January 1882, to Tuscan parents from Siena, Luigi and Emilia Pianigiani. In 1903 he founded together with Giovanni Papini the literary journal Leonardo. In 1908 he founded La Voce, a cultural and literary journal that grew to become very influential.
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Delmore Schwartz
1913 - 1966 (53 years)
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer. Early life Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. He had a younger brother, Kenneth. In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore inherited only a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. Accordi...
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Caroline Brady
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Caroline Agnes Brady was an American philologist who specialised in Old English and Old Norse works. Her works included the 1943 book The Legends of Ermanaric, based on her doctoral dissertation, and three influential papers on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University, among other places.
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Matthias Gelzer
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Matthias Gelzer was a Swiss-German classical historian, known for his studies of the Roman Republic in regard to its politics and society. He was the author of highly regarded biographies on Julius Caesar, Pompey and Cicero.
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David Hughes Parry
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Sir David Hughes Parry was a university administrator, Professor of Law and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1945 to 1948. He was also founder of the university's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in 1947.
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Guy Stanton Ford
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Guy Stanton Ford was the sixth president of the University of Minnesota. Ford had originally come to the University of Minnesota in 1913, serving as the dean of the Graduate School and as a professor of history. He became president in 1938 after the sudden death of Lotus Coffman. He left the University of Minnesota in November 1941 to become the executive secretary of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., and Editor of American Historical Review .
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Edith Finch Russell
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Edith Finch, Countess Russell was an American writer and biographer. She was the fourth and last wife of Bertrand Russell. Biography Finch was born to Edward Bronson Finch, a physician, and his wife, Delia. Raised in New York City, she graduated from Miss Chapin's School. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and St Hilda's College, Oxford where she was awarded degrees in 1925 and 1926.
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James Hearst
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
James Hearst , born James Schell Hearst, was an American poet, philosopher, and university professor, who was sometimes described as the "Robert Frost of the Midwest" . Early life James Hearst was the first child born to Charles E. Hearst and Katharine Hearst, on August 8, 1900. He was born on the family farm in Black Hawk County. His father was a farmer in rural Cedar Falls, Iowa, and a deacon in the Congregational Church. His mother was the first secretary at what is now known as the University of Northern Iowa. Hearst had three younger siblings: Robert Russell Hearst, Charles Joseph Hearst, and Helen Louise Speer.
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Émile Legouis
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Émile Hyacinthe Legouis was a French scholar of English literature and translator. Biography Son of a haberdasher, member of a family of five children, he began his career teaching one year at the college in Avranches. He became a student at the École pratique des hautes études in 1883, he subsequently received first at the agrégation of English in 1885. He was then appointed lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Lyon. Between 1904 and 1932, he taught English language and literature at the Sorbonne , first as a lecturer in 1904, then as a professor in 1906 and he obtained the chair in 1919.
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Wytze Hellinga
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Wytze Gerbens Hellinga was a Dutch professor of linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. Hellinga was the son of Gerben Hellinga, a school master and Taatske Zwart, a writer of children's books. Whilst his father adhered to the strict Dutch Reformed Church his mother was a militant socialist and friend of Nienke van Hichtum, who encouraged her in her career.
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Rosamund Bartlett
1900 - Present (126 years)
Rosamund Bartlett is a British writer, scholar, lecturer, and translator specializing in Russian literature. Bartlett graduated from Durham University with a first-class degree in Russian. She went on to complete a doctorate at Oxford.
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Ludwig Curtius
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Ludwig Curtius was a German archaeologist born in Augsburg. He is remembered for his investigations involving the development of ancient Greek and Roman art. He studied classical archaeology in Munich under Adolf Furtwängler , of whom in 1899 he became tutor to Furtwängler's son, future famed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler . From 1904 to 1907 Curtius participated in excavations at Aegina and Hattusa, afterwards becoming an associate professor at the University of Erlangen, where in 1913 he became professor ordinarius.
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George Edward Woodberry
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
George Edward Woodberry, Litt. D., LL. D. was an American literary critic and poet. Biography Education Woodberry was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1855. The Woodberrys or Woodburys—various spellings of the name exist—immigrated early and, since settlement took root on the North Shore, have been native to Beverly and neighboring seaport towns. Receiving his preparation at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he entered Harvard College in 1872. He was unable to finish his class, though, due to his poor health. He returned in 1875, and he earned his degree in 1877. Woodberry took highest final honors in philosophy, and was awarded an Oration at Commencement.
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Antônio da Silva Mello
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Antônio da Silva Mello , best known as A. da Silva Mello was a Brazilian physician and writer. Biography Mello was born in Juiz de Fora. He studied at the Granbery Institute and then joined the Medical School of Rio de Janeiro, where he attended until the third year, when he moved to Berlin, graduating in 1914. He specialized in clinical medicine, publishing scientific papers on the subject. He wrote on epidemiology, immunity, metabolism, nephrology, nutrition and psychology.
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Yone Noguchi
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He is known in the west as Yone Noguchi. He was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
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Albrecht Dieterich
1866 - 1908 (42 years)
Albrecht Dieterich was a German classical philologist and scholar of religion born in Hersfeld. Academic background He studied at the Universities of Leipzig and Bonn, where at the latter he was a student of Hermann Usener , who in 1899 became Dieterich's father-in-law. In 1888 he earned his doctorate, and three years later received his habilitation in Marburg with a dissertation on Orphism. Afterwards he traveled to Italy and Greece for research purposes. In 1895 he returned to Marburg as an associate professor, and two years later succeeded Eduard Schwartz as chair of classical philology at the University of Giessen.
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Richard Ellmann
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce , which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
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Ricardo Carballo
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Ricardo Carballo Calero , self-styled as Ricardo Carvalho Calero from 1981 onward, was a Spanish philologist, academic and writer. He was the first Professor of Galician Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was a member of the Royal Galician Academy, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and also an honorary member of the Galician Language Association. He was one of the main theorists of contemporary Galician reintegrationism and his works on this field are considered a primary reference. Many consider Carballo Calero as one of the most prominent figures of the twe...
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Marion Clinch Calkins
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Marion Clinch Calkins was an American poet, writer, and teacher who taught English and Art History at the University of Wisconsin and wrote about the labor movement, industrial espionage, and fascism in America.
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Theodor Birt
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Theodor Birt was a German classicist and novelist. He also used the name of the Humanist Beatus Rhenanus as a pseudonym. Life Birt's ancestors came from Pennsylvania and had been settled in Germany for three generations. Birt's father intended for him to become a shopkeeper but allowed his musically talented son to attend the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums, a gymnasium in Hamburg, for three years where Johannes Classen and Adolf Kiessling were his teachers. From 1872, Birt studied classics, at first for a year in Leipzig, and then in Bonn under Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler. From the time he completed his studies he remained at the University of Marburg.
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Ernst Kalinka
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Ernst Kalinka was an Austrian classical philologist and archaeologist. He is considered to be a typical representative of the erstwhile Viennese school of classical studies, in which, the disciplines of philology, epigraphy and archaeology were intertwined as an inseparable unity.
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Axel Kock
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Karl Axel Lichnowsky Kock was a Swedish philologist, professor of Scandinavian languages at Lund University 1907-1916. Kock was born in a merchant family in Trelleborg, but lost both parents at an early age and was raised in the home of the Tegnér family in the university town of Lund, where he became friends with Esaias Tegnér Jr. He studied in Lund and Strassburg, finished both his licentiate and doctorate degrees in 1879 and became a university docent of Scandinavian languages the same year. He was professor of Scandinavian languages at Gothenburg University 1890-1893 and served as rector of the university in 1891.
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Irving Babbitt
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Irving Babbitt was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 and 1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and a consistent opponent of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can, without serious distortion, be called a follower of Aristotle and Edmund Burke. He was an advocate of classical humanism but also offered an ecumenical defense of religion.
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Franz Nikolaus Finck
1867 - 1910 (43 years)
Franz Nikolaus Finck was a German philologist, born in Krefeld. He was a professor of General Linguistics at the University of Berlin. Finck visited the Aran Islands of Ireland, where he lived with speakers of Irish Gaelic. His research on the phonology of Irish resulted in the book Die araner mundart: ein beitrag zur erforschung des westirischen . This work was characteristic of Finck's emphasis on the study of remote dialects of languages.
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Margaret Deland
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Margaret Deland was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement. Biography Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.
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William Shakespeare
1564 - 1616 (52 years)
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" . His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the En...
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Homer
900 BC - 800 BC (100 years)
Homer was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.
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Ovid
43 BC - 17 (60 years)
Publius Ovidius Naso , known in English as Ovid , was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his ban...
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Hesiod
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by Western authors as 'the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject.' Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought, Archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.
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Virgil
70 BC - 19 BC (51 years)
Publius Vergilius Maro , usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
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Euripides
480 BC - 406 BC (74 years)
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete . There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient...
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T. S. Eliot
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His trials in language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
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John Milton
1608 - 1674 (66 years)
John Milton was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
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