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,
#9801
Edmund Wilson
1895 - 1972 (77 years)
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F.
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Petrarch
1304 - 1374 (70 years)
Francesco Petrarca , commonly anglicized as Petrarch , was a scholar and poet of the early Italian Renaissance, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with initiating the 14th-century Italian Renaissance and the founding of Renaissance humanism. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri. Petrarch was later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the .
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Callimachus
320 BC - 243 BC (77 years)
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works in a wide variety of genres, most of which did not survive. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature.
Go to Profile#9804
Henry James
1843 - 1916 (73 years)
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
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Søren Kierkegaard
1813 - 1855 (42 years)
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual," giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against lit...
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C. S. Lewis
1898 - 1963 (65 years)
Clive Staples Lewis, was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford , and Magdalene College, Cambridge . He is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he is also noted for his other works of fiction, such as The Screwtape Letters and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
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Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
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Nonnus
500 - 500 (0 years)
Nonnus of Panopolis was the most notable Greek epic poet of the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived in the 5th century CE. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The epic Dionysiaca describes the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return. It was written in Homeric Greek and in dactylic hexameter, and it consists of 48 books at 20,426 lines.
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Adam Mickiewicz
1798 - 1855 (57 years)
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator and political activist. He is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. A principal figure in Polish Romanticism, he is one of Poland's "Three Bards" and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard". A leading Romantic dramatist, he has been compared in Poland and Europe to Byron and Goethe.
Go to Profile#9810
W. B. Yeats
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.
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Franz Kafka
1883 - 1924 (41 years)
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English ...
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Jane Austen
1775 - 1817 (42 years)
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
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W. H. Auden
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Wystan Hugh Auden was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
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John Ruskin
1819 - 1900 (81 years)
John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
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Arthur Rimbaud
1854 - 1891 (37 years)
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
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H. G. Wells
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Herbert George Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
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Samuel Beckett
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
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Maxim Gorky
1868 - 1936 (68 years)
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , popularly known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet writer and socialist political thinker and proponent. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.
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Emily Dickinson
1830 - 1886 (56 years)
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom.
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Edmund Spenser
1552 - 1599 (47 years)
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse, and he is considered one of the great poets in the English language.
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Alexander Pushkin
1799 - 1837 (38 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, as well as the founder of modern Russian literature.
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George Orwell
1903 - 1950 (47 years)
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
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Langston Hughes
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
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Matthew Arnold
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He was also an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.
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Rabindranath Tagore
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; where his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
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Joseph Conrad
1857 - 1924 (67 years)
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.
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H. L. Mencken
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term "Menckenian" has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
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Lu Xun
1881 - 1936 (55 years)
Zhou Shuren , known by his pen name Lu Xun, was a Chinese writer, literary critic, lecturer, and state servant. He was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese, he was a short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and designer. In the 1930s, he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai during republican-era China .
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Thomas Mann
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
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Gaius Julius Hyginus
64 BC - 17 (81 years)
Gaius Julius Hyginus was a Latin author, a pupil of the scholar Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus. He was elected superintendent of the Palatine library by Augustus according to Suetonius' De Grammaticis, 20. It is not clear whether Hyginus was a native of the Iberian Peninsula or of Alexandria.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky , sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. Numerous literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces.
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Miguel de Cervantes
1547 - 1616 (69 years)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was an Early Modern Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote, a work often cited as both the first modern novel and "the first great novel of world literature". A 2002 poll of around 100 well-known authors voted it the "most meaningful book of all time", from among the "best and most central works in world literature".
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Catullus
84 BC - 54 BC (30 years)
Gaius Valerius Catullus , often referred to simply as Catullus , was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His surviving works are still read widely and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.
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John Dryden
1631 - 1700 (69 years)
John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".
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Herman Melville
1819 - 1891 (72 years)
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick ; Typee , a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
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Charles Baudelaire
1821 - 1867 (46 years)
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
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Nikolai Gogol
1809 - 1852 (43 years)
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright of Ukrainian origin. Gogol was one of the first to use the technique of the grotesque, in works such as "The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", and "Nevsky Prospekt". These stories, and others such as "Diary of a Madman", have also been noted for their proto-surrealist qualities. According to Viktor Shklovsky, Gogol's strange style of writing resembles the "ostranenie" technique of defamiliarization. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804 - 1864 (60 years)
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The following year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody.
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William Carlos Williams
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
William Carlos Williams was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to writing, Williams was a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked".
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Ferdowsi
940 - 1020 (80 years)
Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi , also Firdawsi or Ferdowsi , was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh , which is one of the world's longest epic poemss created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of Persian-speaking countries. Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature.
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Jonathan Swift
1667 - 1745 (78 years)
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".
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Walter Scott
1771 - 1832 (61 years)
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet , was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe , Rob Roy , Waverley , Old Mortality , The Heart of Mid-Lothian , and The Bride of Lammermoor , along with the narrative poems Marmion and The Lady of the Lake . He had a major impact on European and American literature.
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Jean Racine
1639 - 1699 (60 years)
Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther for the young.
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Robert Frost
1874 - 1963 (89 years)
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
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Christopher Marlowe
1564 - 1593 (29 years)
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe , was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era.
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John Donne
1572 - 1631 (59 years)
John Donne was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London . He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
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P. G. Wodehouse
1881 - 1975 (94 years)
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
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Theocritus
400 BC - 260 BC (140 years)
Theocritus was a Greek poet from Sicily, Magna Graecia, and the creator of Ancient Greek pastoral poetry. Life Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to authenticity. It is clear that at a very early date two collections were made: one consisting of poems whose authorship was doubtful yet formed a corpus of bucolic poetry, the other a strict collection of those works considered to have been composed by Theocritus himself.
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809 - 1892 (83 years)
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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Henry Fielding
1707 - 1754 (47 years)
Henry Fielding was an English writer and magistrate known for the use of humour and satire in his works. His 1749 comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was a seminal work in the genre. Along with Samuel Richardson, Fielding is seen as the founder of the traditional English novel. He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.
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