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,
#9751
Maximilian Lambertz
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Maximilian Lambertz was an Austrian linguist, folklorist, and a major personality of Albanology. Biography In the years 1900 to 1905, he studied comparative linguistics and classical philology in Vienna, and subsequently received his doctorate with a dissertation on the "Greek slave name" . A government scholarship enabled him to travel to Italy and Greece. While in Greece, he overheard the conversation of some fishermen from Attica. He got curious when he was told that it was the Arvanitika dialect of the Albanian .This would change his course of work from that moment on. After his return h...
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Pavle Popović
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Pavle Popović was a Serbian literary critic and historian, a professor and rector at the University of Belgrade. He is the brother of Bogdan Popović, also a well-known and equally influential literary critic and university professor.
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John Henry Salter
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
John Henry Salter was an English naturalist and ornithologist. He was a professor of botany at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. Additionally, he published a book about the birds of Wales.
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John McCrae
1872 - 1918 (46 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during the First World War and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war. His famous poem is a threnody, a genre of lament.
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Kyle Meredith Phillips Jr.
1934 - 1988 (54 years)
Kyle Meredith Phillips Jr. was a leading American Etruscologist. Phillips was educated at Bowdoin College and Princeton University . At Princeton he studied with Erik Sjöqvist. In 1962 he joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College. Having excavated with the Princeton team at Morgantina in Sicily, Phillips decided to start a new project. Based on advice from Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Phillips embarked on the excavation of an Etruscan center at Poggio Civitate near Murlo, Siena in 1966. Here Phillips discovered a monumental complex whose interpretation remains controversial, despite ongoing fieldwork.
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Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya was a distinguished scholar of Sanskrit from India. A scholar of Sanskrit, Veda, grammar, Pali, Prakrit and philology, he was born on 27 October 1896 in village Nimta of North 24 Parganas in what was then Bengal. He came from an illustrious family of Kulina Brahmans of Deshmukho in District Hooghly. The Indian writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay belonged to the same family and Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya inherited the spirit of Indian renaissance from him.
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Helen Hull Law
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Helen Hull Law was a professor of Latin and Greek at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1914 until 1927 where her "depth and breadth of scholarship would have frightened the freshmen had not her charming shyness made them feel that they must put her at ease." In 1923 she founded and organized the Kappa Nu Sigma honor society on campus. Law later became professor of Greek at Wellesley College and retired in 1954 after 28 years.
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Léonie Villard
1878 - 1970 (92 years)
Léonie Villard was a French literary critic and professor at the Université de Lyon. She was the first woman to be a professor of literature at a French university. In 1917 she received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book, Jane Austen: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre. She was also a member of the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 1937 and 1950–1951. The college holds her diary of life in Vichy France during the Second World War.
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Junzaburō Nishiwaki
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Junzaburō Nishiwaki was a contemporary Japanese poet and literary critic, active in Shōwa period Japan, specializing in modernism, Dadaism and surrealism. He was also a noted painter of watercolors.
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Petre Strihan
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Petre Strihan was a Romanian poet. Born in Mizil, his parents were Ion Constantinescu, a lawyer, and his wife Steliana . From 1910 to 1918, he attended high school in Ploiești and Buzău. He then studied law at the University of Bucharest from 1918 to 1921, during which time he worked as a copyist within his faculty. He earned a doctorate in 1925, and worked as an instructor , associate professor and professor . From 1942 to 1944, under the regime of Ion Antonescu, he was a deputy state secretary. He was active as a lawyer from 1921 to 1945, at which point he was suspended. Between 1956 and 1...
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James Wreford Watson
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Prof James Wreford Watson FRSE FRSC IBG LLD was a Scottish Canadian geographer and cartographer, who served as the Chief Geographer of Canada and the first president of the Canadian Association of Geographers. He was also a poet who wrote under the name James Wreford and was the recipient of Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry.
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Alexander Miller
1908 - 1960 (52 years)
Alexander "Lex" Miller was a New Zealand Presbyterian minister, author, and Stanford University theologian. Violence towards black activists during the Montgomery bus boycott led Miller to question commitments to nonviolence as noted by Martin Luther King Jr. himself in letter sent April 1957.
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Amado Alonso
1896 - 1952 (56 years)
Amado Alonso was a Spanish philologist, linguist and literary critic, who became a naturalised citizen of Argentina and one of the founders of stylistics. He was a pupil of Ramón Menéndez Pidal at the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid, where he worked on phonetic and geographical linguistics. Between 1927 and 1946 he lived in Buenos Aires, where he headed the Institute of Philology. He then went to Harvard University and lived in America until his death.
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T. H. Parry-Williams
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Thomas Herbert Parry-Williams was a Welsh poet, author and academic. Parry-Williams was born at Tŷ'r Ysgol in Rhyd Ddu, Caernarfonshire, Wales. He was educated at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Jesus College, Oxford, the University of Freiburg and the Sorbonne in Paris. He was a conscientious objector during the First World War.
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Jack H. Adamson
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
Jack Hale Adamson was a literary scholar, biographer, teacher, and university administrator. Biography The son of prominent Idaho statesman William Lennox Adamson, Adamson was born in 1918 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lived in the small town of Carey, Idaho. Born and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served a church mission to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1938–39. He later served in the Army Air Force in World War II and the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War.
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Ernest Hartsock
1903 - 1930 (27 years)
Ernest Abner Hartsock was an American poets of the 1920s. He published three volumes of poetry and served as a Professor of Poetics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. Suffering from pernicious anemia, Hartsock died on December 14, 1930, at the age of 27.
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June Rose Colby
1856 - 1941 (85 years)
June Rose Colby was an American professor of literature. She was the first female faculty member and third woman hired as an instructor at Illinois State Normal University, and was a supporter of the Suffragist movement.
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Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
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Dámaso Alonso
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Dámaso Alonso y Fernández de las Redondas was a Spanish poet, philologist and literary critic. Though a member of the Generation of '27, his best-known work dates from the 1940s onwards. Early life and education Born in Madrid on 22 October 1898, Alonso studied Law, Philosophy and Literature before undertaking research at Madrid's Centro de Estudios Históricos. An enthusiastic participant in the cultural and literary life at the famous Residencia de estudiantes , Alonso also wrote for the literary magazines Revista de Occidente and Los Cuatro Vientos .
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Hermann Mutschmann
1882 - 1918 (36 years)
Hermann Mutschmann was a German classical philologist. He studied classical philology at the University of Bonn as a pupil of Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler, then continued his education at the University of Kiel under Siegfried Sudhaus. In 1906 he received his doctorate at Kiel with a dissertation on Aristotle, titled De divisionibus quae vulgo dicuntur Aristoteleis. In 1907/08 he took a study tour of Italy, followed by work as a tutor in Bonn. In 1910 he obtained his habilitation for classical philology, and in 1913 succeeded Christian Cornelius Jensen as an associate professor at the University of Königsberg.
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Elizabeth Bishop
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
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Friedrich Klingner
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Friedrich Klingner was a German Classical Philologist. He worked at increasingly senior levels as a university professor, successively at the universities of Hamburg , Leipzig and Munich . Viewed by admirers as one of the leading latinists of his generation, he advanced the study of Latin literature, producing important studies of Sallust, Virgil, Horace and Tibullus which continue to engage scholars.
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Daud Kamal
1935 - 1987 (52 years)
Daud Kamal His poetry was influenced by modernist English-language poets like Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Education and career Born in Abbottabad in 1935, the son of Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, who served as the vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar, and was the founder of the Jinnah College for Women in 1964, he received his early education from the Burn Hall Abbottabad there followed by Burn Hall Srinagar, before going to the Islamia College Peshawar. Then, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Peshawar and the Tripos from the University of Cambridge...
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Karl Praechter
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Karl Praechter was a German classical philologist. From 1877 he studied theology in Lausanne, followed by studies of classical philology at several German universities. He worked as a gymnasium teacher in the municipalities of Durlach and Bruchsal, and in 1889 obtained his habilitation in classical philology from the University of Bern. In 1899 he became a full professor at Bern, and later relocated to the University of Halle, where from 1907 to 1926, he served as a professor of classical philology.
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Wolfgang Aly
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Wolfgang Aly was a German classical philologist. He was a member of the NSDAP . On 1 December 1931, he joined and was the first member of the NSDAP of Freiburg University. Works See also External links section below.
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Wirt Williams
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Wirt Williams was an American novelist, journalist, and professor of English. Early life and education Born on August 21, 1921, on the campus of the Goodman, Mississippi-based agricultural school headed by his father , Williams was raised in Cleveland, Mississippi where he was graduated from Cleveland High School . Williams took his undergraduate degree at Delta State University and in 1941, was awarded a master's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University.
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Alexander Laing
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Alexander Kinnan Laing was a poet, novelist, writer and compiler of sea stories, and professor. He spent his career at Dartmouth College, where he also studied. Life and career Laing dropped out of Dartmouth in 1925 and spent two years at sea, an experience that informed much of his later work. He served on the SS Leviathan, a German-built passenger liner that had been seized by the United States in 1917. On the Leviathan, he sailed to Southampton and, later, to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. He retained his affection for the sea, using a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934 to sail around the wo...
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Utuy Tatang Sontani
1920 - 1979 (59 years)
Utuy Tatang Sontani was an Indonesian writer and university lecturer. He was born in Cianjur, West Java. In 1938 he attended an adult school in Bandung, and then became a civil servant. After the independence of Indonesia in 1945, he successively worked for National Broadcasting Station and Books Compilation & Translation Bureau. In 1959 he joined the People's Culture Association, and became a member of its central committee. He lived abroad after 1965, mainly in the Soviet Union, taught at Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, died and was buried in Moscow.
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Vasile Grecu
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Vasile Grecu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian philologist and Byzantinist. Born in Mitocu Dragomirnei, north of Suceava, his parents were Manole Greciuc and Ana . He studied at the Greek-Orthodox Gymnasium in Suceava , followed by the Universities of Vienna and Czernowitz , where Sextil Pușcariu was his professor. From 1910 to 1914, he taught Latin and Greek at the state high school in Câmpulung Moldovenesc. After the outbreak of World War I, he took refuge in the Romanian Old Kingdom. There, he was a proofreader at Monitorul Oficial in Bucharest and a substitute teacher at Mircea cel Batrân High School in Constanța until Romania entered the war in August 1916.
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Alexander Serafimovich
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Alexander Serafimovich was a Russian/Soviet writer and a member of the Moscow literary group Sreda. Biography He was born in a Cossack village on the Don River. His father served as a paymaster in a Cossack regiment. He attended a grammar school, then studied in the Physics and Mathematics faculty of St. Petersburg University. During his time at the University he became friends with Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother, who introduced him to Marxism. He was later exiled to Mezen, a town in northern Russia, for spreading revolutionary propaganda. While in exile he wrote his first story, which was published in Russkiye Vedomosti.
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G. T. Deshpande
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Ganesh Trimbak Deshpande , was an Indian writer, scholar and critic from Maharashtra. Deshpande has authored more than 12 classical works. He has attained international renown and recognition by his scholarly contribution to literary treasure. His Bharatiya Sahitya Shastra work published in 1958, brought him the highest national literary distinction of Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959.
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Toshio Shimao
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Toshio Shimao was a Japanese novelist. He has been called a "writer's writer", which is used as both a compliment and criticism. Biography Shimao was born in Yokohama, but his family moved to Kobe when he was eight. His mother died when he was seventeen and soon after he had a period of study in Nagasaki. He later traveled to Taiwan and the Philippines, but returned to education and graduated from Kyushu University in 1943. In 1944 he entered the military and was sent to Japan's southern Amami Islands as an officer for a naval suicide attack squadron in World War II. The war ended while he was still waiting for his orders.
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C. Hugh Holman
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
C. Hugh Holman was an American literary scholar, academic administrator and detective novelist. He was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and its Provost from 1966 to 1968. He was the vice president of the National Humanities Center. He was the author of many books about Southern literature, and the founding co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. He was the recipient of several awards.
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William Lorimer
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
William Laughton Lorimer, FBA was a Scottish scholar. Born at Strathmartine on the outskirts of Dundee, he was educated at the High School of Dundee, Fettes College, and Trinity College, Oxford. He is best known for the translation of the New Testament into Scots.
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Bernhard Seuffert
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Bernhard Seuffert was a German-Austrian philologist, specializing in German studies. From 1871 he studied classical philology, history and German studies at the University of Würzburg, and afterwards continued his education at Strasbourg as a student of Wilhelm Scherer, Elias von Steinmeyer and Wilhelm Studemund. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation, and subsequently replaced Erich Schmidt as a lecturer at Würzburg. In 1886, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz, where from 1892 to 1924 he worked as a full professor of German philology. In 1913/14 he served as university ...
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A. C. Bradley
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Andrew Cecil Bradley, was an English literary scholar, best remembered for his work on Shakespeare. Life Bradley was born at Park Hill, Clapham, then in Surrey but now part of London. His father was the preacher Charles Bradley , vicar of Glasbury, a noted evangelical Anglican preacher and leader of the so-called Clapham Sect. Charles had thirteen children by his first wife, who died in 1831, and nine by his second wife Emma Linton. Bradley was the youngest of the nine born to Emma and Charles; his older brother, philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, was the fifth. Bradley studied at Balliol College, Oxford.
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René Bazin
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
René François Nicolas Marie Bazin was a French novelist. Biography Born at Angers, he studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became Professor of Law in the Catholic university. In 1876, Bazin married Aline Bricard. The couple had two sons and six daughters. He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, and wrote Stephanette , but he made his reputation with Une Tache d'Encre , which received a prize from the Academy. He was admitted to the Académie française on 28 April 1904, to replace Ernest Legouvé.
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M. K. Joseph
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Michael Kennedy Joseph was a British-born New Zealand poet and novelist in several genres. He studied at Sacred Heart College, Auckland, and at Merton College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1939. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Artillery. His works range from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth to a historical novel, Kaspar's Journey, based on the medieval Children's Crusade. The Hole in the Zero includes the first known use of the word "hoverboard".
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Ehm Welk
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Emil "Ehm" Welk was a German journalist, writer, professor and founder of Volkshochschulen . He became known for his work Die Heiden von Kummerow and used Thomas Trimm as a pseudonym. Life Welk was born as the son of a farmer in Biesenbrow , Brandenburg. After frequenting the village school, the 16-year-old moved away from home, completed a commercial education, worked on the sea and as a journalist for several papers, e.g. in Brunswick for the Braunschweiger Allgemeiner Anzeiger, whose editor-in-chief he was from 1910 on to 1919. Afterwards, he worked for the Braunschweiger Morgenzeitung.
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Mitsuo Nakamura
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Mitsuo Nakamura was the pen-name of a writer of biographies and stage-plays, and a literary critic active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Koba Ichirō. Early life Nakamura Mitsuo was born in Tokyo, in the plebeian district of Shitaya, . In 1923, he attended the Tokyo Normal High School, where one of his classmates was Kaoru Ishikawa. He studied the French language while at the First Higher School, and in April 1931, he entered the Tokyo Imperial University’s Law School. He dropped out after two months, but returned the following year as a student in the Department of French Literature,...
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Basil Willey
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Basil Willey, was British scholar of English literature and intellectual history. Having served in the British Army during the First World War, he rose to become King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1946 and President of Pembroke College from 1958 to until his retirement in 1964.
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Gustav Suits
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Gustav Suits is considered one of the greatest Estonian poets. He was also an early leader of the literary movement group Noor-Eesti . Childhood and education Suits was born in the parish of Võnnu to teacher Hindrik Suits and Liis Suits . He had an older sister, Ann. In 1895, Suits moved to Tartu, Estonia to study at the Alexander Gymnasium. Suits so enjoyed this bustling university town and its intellectual centers that he became determined to become a part of its literary society. By the time he was 16 years old, the newspaper Uus Aeg published his first critical essay. In 1899, the newspa...
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Meša Selimović
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Mehmed "Meša" Selimović was a Yugoslav writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.
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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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