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,
#9901
Antoni Lange
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Antoni Lange was a Polish poet, philosopher, polyglot , writer, novelist, science-writer, reporter and translator. A representative of Polish Parnassianism and symbolism, he is also regarded as belonging to the Decadent movement. He was an expert on Romanticism, French literature and a popularizer of Eastern cultures. His most popular novel is Miranda.
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Abanindranath Tagore
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Abanindranath Tagore was the principal artist and creator of the "Indian Society of Oriental Art". He was also the first major exponent of Swadeshi values in Indian art. He founded the influential Bengal school of art, which led to the development of modern Indian painting. He was also a noted writer, particularly for children. Popularly known as 'Aban Thakur', his books Rajkahini, Buro Angla, Nalak, and Khirer Putul were landmarks in Bengali language children's literature and art.
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Arthur Quiller-Couch
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a British writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900 and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer fictional character Horace Rumpole.
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Theodore Roethke
1908 - 1963 (55 years)
Theodore Huebner Roethke was an American poet. He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking, and the annual National Book Award for Poetry on two occasions: in 1959 for Words for the Wind, and posthumously in 1965 for The Far Field. His work was characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery.
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Franz Grillparzer
1791 - 1872 (81 years)
Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer was an Austrian writer who was considered to be the leading Austrian dramatist of the 19th century. His plays were and are frequently performed at the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. He also wrote the oration for Ludwig van Beethoven's funeral, as well as the epitaph for his friend Franz Schubert.
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Ramón del Valle-Inclán
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán y de la Peña was a Spanish dramatist, novelist, and member of the Spanish Generation of 98. He is considered perhaps the most noteworthy and certainly the most radical dramatist to have worked to subvert the traditionalism of the Spanish theatrical establishment in the early part of the 20th century. His influence on later generations of Spanish dramatists makes his drama even more significant. He is honored on National Theatre Day with a statue in Madrid that receives homage from the theatrical profession.
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Nikolaus Lenau
1802 - 1850 (48 years)
Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau , a German-language Austrian poet. Biography He was born at Csatád , Kingdom of Hungary, now Lenauheim, Banat, then part of the Habsburg monarchy, now in Romania. His father, a Habsburg government official, died in 1807 in Budapest, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who remarried in 1811. In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony and then spent the next four years qualifying himself in medicine. Unable to settle down to any profession, he began writing verse.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin
1884 - 1937 (53 years)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin , sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. However, Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All-Union Communist Party
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György Lukács
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
1806 - 1876 (70 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl was a German scholar best known for his studies of Plautus. Biography Ritschl was born in Großvargula, in present-day Thuringia. His family, in which culture and poverty were hereditary, were Protestants who had migrated several generations earlier from Bohemia. Ritschl was fortunate in his school training, at a time when the great reform in the higher schools of Prussia had not yet been thoroughly carried out. His chief teacher, Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, divined the boy's genius and allowed it free growth, applying only so much either of stimulus or of restraint as was absolutely needful.
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Mantarō Kubota
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Mantarō Kubota was a Japanese author, playwright, and poet. Early life Kubota was born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, to a clothing merchant family. He became interested in stage plays at an early age, largely due to the influence of his grandmother, who also provided financial support for him to attend college. While attending college preparatory courses, he attended lectures by Mori Ōgai and Nagai Kafū. While still a student at Keio University in 1911, he made his literary debut with the short novel Asagao and a stage play Yugi , both of which appeared in the university's journal Mita Bungaku, and which led to a long-lasting friendship and association with Takitarō Minakami.
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Heinrich Hübschmann
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Johann Heinrich Hübschmann was a German philologist. Life Hübschmann was born on 1 July 1848 at Erfurt. He studied Oriental philology at Jena, Tübingen, Leipzig, and Munich; in 1876 he became professor of Iranian languages at Leipzig, and in 1877 professor of comparative philology at Strasbourg. Hübschmann died on 20 January 1908 in Freiburg im Breisgau.
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John Cleland
1709 - 1789 (80 years)
John Cleland was an English novelist best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him "a sly, old malcontent".
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Joe Orton
1933 - 1967 (34 years)
John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
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DuBose Heyward
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Edwin DuBose Heyward was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.
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Tom Taylor
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Tom Taylor was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.
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Luo Guanzhong
1334 - 1400 (66 years)
Luo Ben , better known by his courtesy name Guanzhong , was a Chinese writer who lived during the Ming dynasty. He is also known by his pseudonym Huhai Sanren . Luo Guanzhong is credited with writing Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
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José Hernández
1834 - 1886 (52 years)
José Hernández was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierro. Biography Hernández, whose ancestry was Spanish, was born on a farm near San Martín . His father was a majordomo or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation.
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Rafael Obligado
1851 - 1920 (69 years)
Rafael Obligado was an Argentine poet and playwright. Obligado was the son of María Jacinta Ortiz Urién and Luis Obligado y Saavedra. During the 1880s, he became known as el poeta del Paraná . He wrote poetry with gaucho themes, but using cultured and educated language. He was heavily influenced by contemporary French poetry, and became well known in Argentina for his poem Santos Vega, an ode to a gaucho-troubadour, a type of composer and performer known in Argentina under the name of payador.
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Sholem Asch
1880 - 1957 (77 years)
Sholem Asch , also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. Life and work Asch was born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Congress Poland to Moszek Asz , a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska . Frajda was Moszek's second wife; his first wife Rude Shmit died in 1873, leaving him with either six or seven children . Sholem was the fourth of the ten children that Moszek and Frajda Malka had together. Moszek would spend all week on the road and return home every Friday in time for the Sabbath. He w...
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George Lyman Kittredge
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
George Lyman Kittredge was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England and New England.
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Kafū Nagai
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Kafū Nagai was a Japanese writer, editor and translator. His works like Geisha in Rivalry and A Strange Tale from East of the River are noted for their depictions of life of the demimonde in early 20th-century Tokyo.
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Albert Verwey
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Albert Verwey was a Dutch poet belonging to the "Movement of Eighty". As a translator, staffer, and literary historian he played an important role in the literary life of The Netherlands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Joseph Bédier
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Joseph Bédier was a French writer and historian of medieval France. Biography Bédier was born in Paris, France, to Adolphe Bédier, a lawyer of Breton origin, and spent his childhood in Réunion. He was a professor of medieval French literature at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland and the Collège de France, Paris .
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William Goyen
1915 - 1983 (68 years)
Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.
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Francisco Urondo
1930 - 1976 (46 years)
Francisco "Paco" Urondo was an Argentine writer and member of the Montoneros guerrilla organization. Urondo published multiple collections of poetry, short stories, theatrical works, and a novel, as well as La patria fusilada, his famous interview with the survivors of the massacre at Trelew, and his critical essay Veinte años de poesía argentina. He also collaborated in the writing of movie scripts such as Pajarito Gómez and Noche terrible, and adapted for television Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and Eça de Queiroz's Os Maias.
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Mihail Sebastian
1907 - 1945 (38 years)
Mihail Sebastian was a Romanian playwright, essayist, journalist and novelist. Life Sebastian was born to a Jewish family in Brăila, the son of Mendel and Clara Hechter. After completing his secondary education, Sebastian studied law in Bucharest, but was soon attracted to the literary life and the exciting ideas of the new generation of Romanian intellectuals, as epitomized by the literary group Criterion which included Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Eugène Ionesco. Sebastian published several novels, including Accidentul and Orașul cu salcâmi , heavily influenced by French novelists such a...
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Johannes Aavik
1880 - 1973 (93 years)
Johannes Aavik was an Estonian philologist and Fennophile who played an influential role in the modernization and development of the Estonian language. Education and career Aavik studied history at the University of Tartu and the University of Nezin in 1905. He was a member of the Young Estonia movement and obtained a Doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Helsinki in 1910. Aavik taught Estonian and French at Tartu University between 1926 and 1933. In 1934 he was appointed by the Estonian Ministry of Education as Chief Inspector of Secondary Schools, a position he held until 1940.
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Shōhei Ōoka
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Shōhei Ōoka was a Japanese novelist, literary critic, and lecturer and translator of French literature who was active during the Shōwa period of Japan. Ōoka belongs to the group of postwar writers whose World War II experiences at home and abroad figure prominently in their works. Over his lifetime, he contributed short stories and critical essays to almost every literary magazine in Japan.
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Karel Sabina
1813 - 1877 (64 years)
Karel Sabina was a Czech writer and journalist. Life Karel Sabina grew up in poverty as an extramarital child of a daughter of a sugar producing factory's director in the family of a bricklayer and a washerwoman. Sabina later claimed that he was an illegitimate son of a Polish noble. Studied philosophy and law, but did not graduate. In 1848 Sabina became one of the leaders of the Czech radical democrats, the founder of a secret radical political circle "Repeal" , a member of the National Committee and the Czech congress. Sabina published many articles to magazines during this period.
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Emir Rodríguez Monegal
1921 - 1985 (64 years)
Emir Rodríguez Monegal , born in Uruguay, was a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal .
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Charles Péguy
1873 - 1914 (41 years)
Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.
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John Vanbrugh
1664 - 1726 (62 years)
Sir John Vanbrugh was an English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife , which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy. He was knighted in 1714.
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Manly Wade Wellman
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer. While his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown and Strange Stories, Wellman is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to the legendary Weird Tales and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as "the dean of fantasy writers." Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, detective fiction, western fiction, juveni...
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Damon Runyon
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Alfred Damon Runyon was an American journalist and short-story writer. He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from Brooklyn or Midtown Manhattan. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character and the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicts.
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Mizuho Ōta
1876 - 1955 (79 years)
Mizuho Ōta was the pen-name of Teiichi Ōta, a Japanese poet and scholar of Japanese literature, active in Shōwa period Japan. He also occasionally used another pen name, Mizuhonoya. Early life Ōta was born in Chikuma District, Nagano prefecture in what is now part of the city of Shiojiri. While still a student at Nagano Normal School , he taught himself the basics of traditional Japanese poetry by studying the ancient Japanese literature classics such as the Man'yōshū and Kokinshū, When he began writing his own poetry, he was able to get it published in the prestigious literary journal, Bungak...
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Tōson Shimazaki
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Tōson Shimazaki was the pen-name of Haruki Shimazaki, a Japanese writer active in the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He began his career as a Romantic poet, but went on to establish himself as a major proponent of Japanese Naturalism.
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Clifford D. Simak
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.
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August Immanuel Bekker
1785 - 1871 (86 years)
August Immanuel Bekker was a German philologist and critic. Biography Born in Berlin, Bekker completed his classical education at the University of Halle under Friedrich August Wolf, who considered him as his most promising pupil. In 1810 he was appointed professor of philosophy in the University of Berlin. For several years, between 1810 and 1821, he travelled in France, Italy, England and parts of Germany, examining classical manuscripts and gathering materials for his great editorial labours.
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Hovhannes Tumanyan
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Hovhannes Tumanyan was an Armenian poet, writer, translator, and literary and public activist. He is the national poet of Armenia. Tumanyan wrote poems, quatrains, ballads, novels, fables, and critical and journalistic articles. His works were mostly written in the style of realism, frequently revolving around the everyday life of his time. Born in the historical village of Dsegh in the Lori region, at a young age Tumanyan moved to Tiflis, which was the centre of Armenian culture under the Russian Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He soon became known to the wide Armenian socie...
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Aleksis Kivi
1834 - 1872 (38 years)
Aleksis Kivi was a Finnish author who wrote the first significant novel in the Finnish language, Seitsemän veljestä in 1870. He is also known for his 1864 play Heath Cobblers. Although Kivi was among the very earliest authors of prose and lyrics in Finnish, he is still considered one of the greatest.
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Kunio Kishida
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Kunio Kishida was a Japanese playwright, dramatist, novelist, lecturer, acting coach, theatre critic, translator, and proponent of Shingeki . Kishida spearheaded the modernization of Japanese dramaturgy and transformed Japanese theatre acting. He was a staunch advocate for the theatre to operate as a dual artistic and literary space.
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Hans Ferdinand Massmann
1797 - 1874 (77 years)
Hans Ferdinand Massmann was a German philologist, known for his studies in Old German language and literature, and for his work introducing gymnastics into schools in Prussia. Biography Massmann was born in Berlin, Margraviate of Brandenburg, where he also studied. He served in the War of Liberation, was a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, and was present at the Wartburg festival of 1817, where he participated in the book burning. In Berlin, he had been a friend and a pupil of Jahn. His radical ideas and "demagogue" sympathies brought him into difficulties with the authorities.
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William Ellery Channing
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
William Ellery Channing II was an American Transcendentalist poet, nephew and namesake of the Unitarian preacher Dr. William Ellery Channing. His uncle was usually known as "Dr. Channing", while the nephew was commonly called "Ellery Channing", in print. The younger Ellery Channing was thought brilliant but undisciplined by many of his contemporaries. Amos Bronson Alcott famously said of him in 1871, "Whim, thy name is Channing." Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists thought his poetry among the best of their group's literary products.
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George Ade
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
George Ade was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, and playwright who gained national notoriety at the turn of the 20th century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town", a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog.
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Thomas Campbell
1777 - 1844 (67 years)
Thomas Campbell was a Scottish poet. He was a founder and the first President of the Clarence Club and a co-founder of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland; he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what became University College London. In 1799 he wrote Pleasures of Hope, a traditional 18th-century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several patriotic war songs— "Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and, in 1801, The Battle of the Baltic, but was no less at home in delicate lyrics such as "At Love's Beginning".
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Balys Sruoga
1896 - 1947 (51 years)
Balys Sruoga was a Lithuanian poet, playwright, critic, and literary theorist. Early life He contributed to cultural journals from his early youth. His works were published by the liberal wing of the Lithuanian cultural movement, and also in various Lithuanian newspapers and other outlets . In 1914, he began studying literature in Saint Petersburg, and later in Moscow, due to World War I and the Russian Revolution. In 1921, he enrolled in the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where in 1924 he received his Ph.D for a doctoral thesis on Lithuanian folklore.
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Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
1826 - 1889 (63 years)
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin , born Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov and known during his lifetime by the pen name Nikolai Shchedrin , was a major Russian writer and satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of a Russian literary magazine Otechestvenniye Zapiski until the Tsarist government banned it in 1884. In his works Saltykov mastered both stark realism and satirical grotesque merged with fantasy. His most famous works, the family chronicle novel The Golovl...
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Eleanor Farjeon
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Eleanor Farjeon was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire. Several of her works had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Some of her correspondence has also been published. She won many literary awards and the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature is presented annually in her memory by the Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers. She was the sister of thriller writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
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Jean Toomer
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane , which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a Negro writer, as he identified as "American".
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