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
Martti Haavio
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Martti Henrikki Haavio was a Finnish poet, folklorist and mythologist, writing poetry under the pen name P. Mustapää. He was born on 22 January 1899 in Temmes, and died on 4 February 1973 in Helsinki. He was also a professor of folklore and an influential researcher of Finnish mythology. In 1960, Haavio married Aale Tynni, after his first wife Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio died in 1951 of cancer. His daughter, Elina Haavio-Mannila, is a social scientist. During Haavio's early career, he was a member of the Tulenkantajat literature club.
Go to Profile#9602
Fredrik Cygnaeus
1807 - 1881 (74 years)
Fredrik Cygnaeus was a Finnish poet, art critic and collector, docent of history and university professor of aesthetics and literature. Cygnaeus was an influential figure in Finnish art and literature, contributed to Finnish nationalism and was a central person in the Fennoman movement .
Go to Profile#9603
Thomas Hood
1799 - 1845 (46 years)
Thomas Hood was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, had lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson. Hood was the father of the playwright and humorist Tom Hood and the children's writer Frances Freeling Broderip .
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Tekkan Yosano
1873 - 1935 (62 years)
Tekkan Yosano was the pen-name of Yosano Hiroshi, a Japanese author and poet active in late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa period Japan. His wife was fellow author Yosano Akiko. Cabinet minister and politician Kaoru Yosano is his grandson.
Go to Profile#9605
Sidney Howard
1891 - 1939 (48 years)
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
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Gabriel Ferrater
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
Gabriel Ferrater i Soler was an author, translator and scholar of linguistics of the sixties who wrote in Catalan language. His poetical work is one of the most important among the authors of post-war Catalonia and he continues to exert a great deal of influence over authors nowadays. He published three collections of poems: Da nuces pueris , Menja't una cama and Teoria dels cossos , consequently compiled into a single volume called Les dones i els dies , which was a milestone in Catalan literature.
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John Skelton
1460 - 1529 (69 years)
John Skelton, also known as John Shelton , possibly born in Diss, Norfolk, was an English poet and tutor to King Henry VIII of England. Skelton died in Westminster and was buried in St. Margaret's Church, although no trace of the tomb remains.
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Friedrich Gundolf
1880 - 1931 (51 years)
Friedrich Gundolf, born Friedrich Leopold Gundelfinger was a German-Jewish literary scholar and poet and one of the best known academics of the Weimar Republic. Early life and career Gundolf, who was the son of a mathematician, studied art history and German language and literature at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate in 1903 and completed his Habilitation eight years later. His habilitation work about "Shakespeare and the German spirit" , marked a turning point in German language and literature studies.
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Friedebert Tuglas
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Friedebert Tuglas, born Friedebert Mihkelson or Michelson , was an Estonian writer and critic who introduced Impressionism and Symbolism to Estonian literature. Persecuted by the authorities in the beginning of 20th century, he later became an acknowledged representative of Estonian literature in the Soviet era.
Go to Profile#9611
Kazimierz Brodziński
1791 - 1835 (44 years)
Kazimierz Brodziński was an important Polish Romantic poet. Life He was born in Królówka near Bochnia. He came from the low nobility. He was a student at schools in Tarnów, where he also graduated from the grammar school. He served in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw. He took part in the campaign of 1812, during which he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. During the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Prussians. Having returned from captivity in 1814, he settled in Warsaw, where he worked as a clerk. He joined the freemasons, advanced to the fifth degree of initiation; in 1819 he became the secretary of the Great East.
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Francis Thompson
1859 - 1907 (48 years)
Francis Joseph Thompson was an English poet and Catholic mystic. At the behest of his father, a doctor, he entered medical school at the age of 18, but at 26 left home to pursue his talent as a writer and poet. He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labour, becoming addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem.
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Ouida
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Maria Louise Ramé , going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida , was an English novelist. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.
Go to Profile#9614
Hemachandra
1089 - 1172 (83 years)
Hemachandra was a 12th century Indian Jain saint, scholar, poet, mathematician, philosopher, yogi, grammarian, law theorist, historian, lexicographer, rhetorician, logician, and prosodist. Noted as a prodigy by his contemporaries, he gained the title kalikālasarvajña, "the knower of all knowledge in his times" and father of the Gujarati language.
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Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
Go to Profile#9616
G. A. Henty
1832 - 1902 (70 years)
George Alfred Henty was an English novelist and war correspondent. He is most well-known for his works of adventure fiction and historical fiction, including The Dragon & The Raven , For The Temple , Under Drake's Flag and In Freedom's Cause .
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Edward Dowden
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Edward Dowden was an Irish critic, professor, and poet. Biography He was the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant and landowner, and was born at Cork, three years after his brother John, who became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. Edward's literary tastes emerged early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve. His home education continued at Queen's College, Cork and at Trinity College, Dublin. He contributed to the literary magazine Kottabos.
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John Livingston Lowes
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
John Livingston Lowes was an American scholar and critic of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer. Life John Livingston Lowes was born in Decatur, Indiana on December 20, 1867. He earned a B.A. from Washington and Jefferson College in 1888 and did postgraduate work in Germany and at Harvard University. He taught mathematics at Washington and Jefferson College until 1891 when he received his M.A.
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Maurice Bloomfield
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Maurice Bloomfield, Ph.D., LL.D. was an Austrian Empire-born American philologist and Sanskrit scholar. Biography He was born Maurice Blumenfeld in Bielitz , in what was at that time Austrian Silesia to Jewish parents. His sister was Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and the linguist Leonard Bloomfield was his nephew. He married Rosa Zeisler in 1885, and had a son and a daughter; Rosa died in 1920. In 1921, he married Helen Scott.
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Almeida Garrett
1799 - 1854 (55 years)
João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, 1st Viscount of Almeida Garrett was a Portuguese poet, orator, playwright, novelist, journalist, politician, and a peer of the realm. A major promoter of theater in Portugal he is considered the greatest figure of Portuguese Romanticism and a true revolutionary and humanist. He proposed the construction of the D. Maria II National Theatre and the creation of the Conservatory of Dramatic Art.
Go to Profile#9621
Polyaenus
101 - 200 (99 years)
Polyaenus or Polyenus was a 2nd-century CE Greek author, known best for his Stratagems in War , which has been preserved. He was born in Bithynia. The Suda calls him a rhetorician, and Polyaenus himself writes that he was accustomed to plead causes before the Roman emperor. Polyaenus dedicated Stratagems in War to the two emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus , while they were engaged in the Roman–Parthian War of 161–166, about 163, at which time he was too old to accompany them in their campaigns.
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Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve
1831 - 1924 (93 years)
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was an American classical scholar. An author of numerous works, and founding editor of the American Journal of Philology, he has been credited with contributions to the syntax of Greek and Latin, and the history of Greek literature.
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Irving Stone
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Irving Stone was an American writer, chiefly known for his biographical novels of noted artists, politicians, and intellectuals. Among the best known are Lust for Life , about the life of Vincent van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy , about Michelangelo.
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Thomas Holcroft
1745 - 1809 (64 years)
Thomas Holcroft was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator. He was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine to publish the first part of The Rights of Man.
Go to Profile#9625
Victor Eftimiu
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Victor Eftimiu was a Romanian poet and playwright. He was a contributor to Sburătorul, a Romanian literary magazine. His works have been performed in the State Jewish Theater of Romania. Eftimiu was of Albanian origin, but also had Aromanian descent through his father Gheorghe Eftimiu, a merchant. Eftimiu's mother was Maria Eftimiu, née Cociu. Victor Eftimiu was born in Boboshticë near Korçë. In 1905, he emigrated from Albania to Romania, where he found work as a theatre manager in 1913. He published several books of poetry, and wrote comedies and satirical pieces for the theatre. He also wrote a volume of Romanian fairy tales, and several children's books.
Go to Profile#9626
Otto Kern
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Otto Ferdinand Georg Kern was a German classical philologist, archaeologist and epigraphist. He specialized in the field of ancient Greek religion, being known for his investigations of Greek mystery cults and Orphism, as well as the ancient city of Magnesia on the Maeander and later also the history of ancient studies. In 1907 he became professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he became rector in 1915/16.
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Robert Hillyer
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Robert Silliman Hillyer was an American poet and professor of English literature. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. Early life Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey to an old Connecticut family. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. After high school, he attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude in 1917. While there, he was the editor of the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was affiliated with the group known as the Harvard Aesthetes.
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Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
1848 - 1895 (47 years)
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was a Norwegian-American author and college professor. He is best remembered for his novel Gunnar: A Tale of Norse Life, which is generally considered to have been the first novel by a Norwegian immigrant in America.
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Walther Kranz
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Walther Kranz was a German classical philologist and historian of philosophy. Biography Kranz studied classical philology at the University of Berlin from 1903 to 1907 with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Hermann Diels and Eduard Norden. He received his doctorate in 1910 with Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. For several years he was a teacher at the Berlin-Grunewald experimental school. In 1932, he joined the University of Halle as an honorary professor of classical languages . He took over the publication of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker from the 5th edition onwards. After the takeover by the Nazis, he experienced political difficulties because his wife was Jewish.
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Tsubouchi Shōyō
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Tsubouchi Shōyō was a Japanese author, critic, playwright, translator, editor, educator, and professor at Waseda University. He has been referred to as a seminal figure in Japanese drama. Biography He was born Tsubouchi Yūzō , in Gifu prefecture. He also used the pen name Harunoya Oboro .
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Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
1836 - 1895 (59 years)
Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian nobleman, writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name, invented by his contemporary, the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Masoch did not approve of this use of his name.
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Francis Buchanan-Hamilton
1762 - 1829 (67 years)
Francis Buchanan , later known as Francis Hamilton but often referred to as Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, was a Scottish surgeon, surveyor and botanist who made significant contributions as a geographer and zoologist while living in India. He did not assume the name of Hamilton until three years after his retirement from India.
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Radclyffe Hall
1880 - 1943 (63 years)
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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Robert Fitzgerald
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was an American poet, literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students". He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. He also composed several books of his own poetry.
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Cao Xueqin
1724 - 1763 (39 years)
Cáo Xuěqín ; was a Chinese novelist and poet during the Qing dynasty. He is best known as the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. His given name was Cáo Zhān and his courtesy name was Mèngruǎn .
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Leonardo Sciascia
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Leonardo Sciascia was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Porte Aperte , Cadaveri Eccellenti , Todo Modo and Il giorno della civetta .
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Alain-René Lesage
1668 - 1747 (79 years)
Alain-René Lesage was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks , his comedy Turcaret , and his picaresque novel Gil Blas . Life Youth and education Claude Lesage, the father of the novelist, held the united positions of advocate, notary and registrar of the royal court in Rhuys. His mother's name was Jeanne Brenugat. Both Lesage's father and mother died when Lesage was very young, and he was left in the care of his uncle who wasted his education and fortune. Père Bochard, of the Order of the Jesuits, Principal of the College in Vannes, became interested in the boy on account of his natural talents.
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Angelo Maria Ripellino
1923 - 1978 (55 years)
Angelo Maria Ripellino was an Italian translator, poet, linguist and academic. Life and career Born in Palermo, the son of a high school professor, in 1945 Ripellino graduated in Slavistics at the University of Palermo. In 1947 he enrolled the filmmaking courses at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; the same year he married Ela Hlochova, a Czech student of Italian literature he had known during a 1946 study travel in Prague, who would who would become his closer collaborator.
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Robert Dodsley
1704 - 1764 (60 years)
Robert Dodsley was an English bookseller, publisher, poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer. Life Dodsley was born near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where his father was master of the free school. He is said to have been apprenticed to a stocking-weaver in Mansfield, from whom he ran away, going into service as a footman. Profits and fame from his early literary works enabled Dodsley to establish himself with the help of his friends as a bookseller at the sign of Tully's Head in Pall Mall, London, in 1735.
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Michel Carré
1821 - 1872 (51 years)
Michel Carré was a prolific French librettist. He went to Paris in 1840 intending to become a painter but took up writing instead. He wrote verse and plays before turning to writing libretti. He wrote the text for Charles Gounod's Mireille on his own, and collaborated with Eugène Cormon on Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles. However, the majority of his libretti were completed in tandem with Jules Barbier, with whom he wrote the libretti for numerous operas, including Camille Saint-Saëns's Le timbre d'argent , Gounod's Faust , Roméo et Juliette , and Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann . As with t...
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Anna Pavlova
1881 - 1931 (50 years)
Anna Pavlovna Pavlova was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India, Mexico and Australia.
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Devaneya Pavanar
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Devaneya Pavanar was an Indian scholar who wrote over 35 research volumes on Tamil language and literature. Additionally, he was a staunch proponent of the "Pure Tamil movement" and initiated the Etymological Dictionary Project primarily to bring out the roots of Tamil words and their connections and ramifications with Nostratic studies.
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Viktor Petrov
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Viktor Platonovych Petrov was a prominent Ukrainian existentialist writer. Together with Valerian Pidmohylny, Petrov is considered to be the founder of the Ukrainian intellectual novel. Although Petrov is remembered as a writer today, during his life he was a scientist in the first place. He wrote papers on archaeology, anthropology, history, philosophy and literature.
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Christopher Okigbo
1930 - 1967 (37 years)
Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
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Endre Ady
1877 - 1919 (42 years)
Endre Ady was a turn-of-the-century Hungarian poet and journalist. Regarded by many as the greatest Hungarian poet of the 20th century, he was noted for his steadfast belief in social progress and development and for his poetry's exploration of fundamental questions of the modern European experience: love, temporality, faith, individuality, and patriotism.
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William Barnes
1801 - 1886 (85 years)
William Barnes was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a comprehensive English grammar quoting from more than 70 different languages. A linguistic purist, Barnes strongly advocated against borrowing foreign words into English, and instead supported the use and proliferation of "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech".
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Maik Yohansen
1895 - 1937 (42 years)
Maik Hervasiiovych Yohansen or Mike Johansen – was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and linguist. He was one of the founders of VAPLITE. Biography Maik Yohansen was born on 16 October 1895 in Kharkiv. His father, a Latvian emigrant was a teacher of German, and made sure his son had a proper education. Maik Yohansen received his secondary education at the Kharkiv Third Gymnasium. There he studied along with Hryhoriy Petnikov and Bohdan Hordeev , who later became well-known poet-futurists, as well as with Yuriy Platonov – a geographer and prose writer. Afterwards, ...
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William Beebe
1877 - 1962 (85 years)
Charles William Beebe was an American naturalist, ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, explorer, and author. He is remembered for the numerous expeditions he conducted for the New York Zoological Society, his deep dives in the Bathysphere, and his prolific scientific writing for academic and popular audiences.
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Georg Friedrich Benecke
1762 - 1844 (82 years)
Georg Friedrich Benecke was a German philologist. Beginning in 1780, he was a student at the University of Göttingen, where he was a pupil of Christian Gottlob Heyne. In 1814 he became a full professor at Göttingen, and later on, acquired duties as a head librarian.
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