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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#101
Kuvempu
#1331
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa , popularly known by his pen name Kuvempu, was an Indian poet, playwright, novelist and critic. He is widely regarded as the greatest Kannada poet of the 20th century. He was the first Kannada writer to receive the Jnanpith Award.
Go to Profile#102
Robert Anton Wilson
#239
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
Go to Profile#103
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
#920
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu and who formerly wrote in English. He has been described as having been "considered East Africa's leading novelist". His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 100 languages from around the world.
Go to Profile#104
Angela Carter
#1890
Overall Influence
1940 - 1992 (52 years)
Angela Olive Pearce , who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is mainly known for her book The Bloody Chamber . In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was adapted into a film of the same name. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Go to Profile#105
Dave Marsh
#1224
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dave Marsh is an American music critic, and radio talk show host. He was an early editor of Creem magazine, has written for various publications such as Newsday, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, and has published numerous books about music and musicians, mostly focused on rock music. He is also a committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Patrick O'Brian
#733
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Patrick O'Brian, CBE , born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously contain...
Go to Profile#107
Cynthia Ozick
#2703
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Biography Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City. The second of two children, Ozick was raised in the Bronx by her parents, Celia and William Ozick. They were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood.
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Kurt Vonnegut
#947
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
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Lloyd Alexander
#3246
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Lloyd Chudley Alexander was an American author of more than 40 books, primarily fantasy novels for children and young adults. Over his seven-decade career, Alexander wrote 48 books, and his work has been translated into 20 languages. His most famous work is The Chronicles of Prydain, a series of five high fantasy novels whose conclusion, The High King, was awarded the 1969 Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature. He won U.S. National Book Awards in 1971 and 1982.
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Tomas Tranströmer
#2259
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer was a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer's work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He has been described as a Christian poet.
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Amiri Baraka
#1286
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Amiri Baraka , previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
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Gérard Genette
#2452
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
Go to Profile#113
Susan Cooper
#2813
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Susan Mary Cooper is an English author of children's books. She is best known for The Dark Is Rising, a contemporary fantasy series set in England and Wales, which incorporates British mythology such as the Arthurian legends and Welsh folk heroes. For that work, in 2012 she won the lifetime Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association, recognizing her contribution to writing for teens. In the 1970s two of the five novels were named the year's best English-language book with an "authentic Welsh background" by the Welsh Books Council.
Go to Profile#114
Richard Matheson
#1748
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Richard Burton Matheson was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is best known as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 science fiction horror novel that has been adapted for the screen three times. Matheson himself was co-writer of the first film version, The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was released in 1964. The other two adaptations were The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith. Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet...
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J. G. Ballard
#1278
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations among human psychology, technology, sex, and the mass media. Ballard became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels, such as The Drowned World , but also courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition , which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" , and the novel Crash , a story about car-crash fetishists.
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David Lodge
#1766
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David John Lodge CBE is an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses , Small World: An Academic Romance and Nice Work . The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers . Lodge has also written television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.
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René Girard
#550
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
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James Wood
#2677
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. Wood was The Guardians chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995. He was a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. , he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
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Peter Straub
#3456
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Peter Francis Straub was an American novelist and poet. He had success with several horror and supernatural fiction novels, among them Julia , Ghost Story and The Talisman , the latter co-writen with Stephen King. He explored the mystery genre with the Blue Rose trilogy, consisting of Koko , Mystery and The Throat . He fused the supernatural with crime fiction in Lost Boy, Lost Girl and the related In the Night Room . For the Library of America, he edited the volume H. P. Lovecraft: Tales and the anthology American Fantastic Tales. Straub received such literary honors as the Bram Stoker A...
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Joan Didion
#1452
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.
Go to Profile#121
J. Hillis Miller
#2204
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using pr...
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V. S. Naipaul
#1300
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
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Alice Walker
#999
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
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Neal Stephenson
#367
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
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Richie Unterberger
#1849
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Richie Unterberger is an American author and journalist whose focus is popular music and travel writing. Life and writing Unterberger attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the university newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian and in the early 1980s was a deejay on the Penn radio station, WXPN-FM. Just prior to graduating in late 1982, he started reviewing records for Op magazine, which marked the start of his career as a freelance writer.
Go to Profile#126
Clement Greenberg
#866
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Clement Greenberg , occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.
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Andrew Motion
#2076
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Go to Profile#128
George Saunders
#2419
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
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Frank Kermode
#2310
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing. He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University.
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Jeffrey Eugenides
#1669
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides , Middlesex , and The Marriage Plot . The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
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Tove Jansson
#1769
Overall Influence
1914 - 2001 (87 years)
Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnishish author, novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. Brought up by artistic parents, Jansson studied art from 1930 to 1938 in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris. Her first solo art exhibition was held in 1943. Over the same period, she penned short stories and articles for publication, and subsequently drew illustrations for book covers, advertisements, and postcards. She continued her work as an artist and writer for the rest of her life.
Go to Profile#132
Rafael Alberti
#2335
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Rafael Alberti Merello was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature, and he won numerous prizes and awards. He died aged 96. After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile because of his Marxist beliefs. On his return to Spain after the death of Franco, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía in 1983 and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Cádiz in 1985.
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David Browne
#1174
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
David Browne is an American journalist and author. He is currently a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributor since 2008. He was the resident music critic at Entertainment Weekly between 1990 and 2006. He was an editor at Music & Sound Output magazine and a music critic at the New York Daily News before EW. He has written articles for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Spin, The New Republic and Time, as well as stories for NPR.
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Jimmy Fallon
#459
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
James Thomas Fallon is an American comedian, television host and actor. Best known for his work in television, Fallon's breakthrough came during his tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1998 to 2004. He was the host of the late-night talk show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014, and became the anchor of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon following his departure from Late Night.
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Nadine Gordimer
#1595
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
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Frank Rich
#1192
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Frank Hart Rich Jr. is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.
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Helen Vendler
#3108
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. Life and career Helen Hennessy Vendler was born on April 30, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Hennessy and Helen Hennessy. She was the second of three children. Her parents encouraged her to read poems as a child. Vendler's father taught Spanish, French, and Italian at a high school, while her mother had taught in a primary school before marriage. Vendler attended Emmanuel College over the Boston Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College because her parents would not let her enroll in "secular education".
Go to Profile#138
Bret Easton Ellis
#2162
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Bret Easton Ellis is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.
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Gwendolyn Brooks
#2780
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
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Raymond Benson
#2185
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Raymond Benson is an American writer known for his James Bond novels published between 1997 and 2003. Early life and education Benson was born in Midland, Texas and graduated from Permian High School in Odessa in 1973. In primary school Benson took an interest in the piano which would later in his life develop into an interest in composing music, mostly for theatrical productions. Benson also took part in drama at school and became the vice president of his high school's drama department, an interest that he would later pursue by directing stage productions in New York City after attending an...
Go to Profile#141
Louise Glück
#2585
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Go to Profile#142
Jimmy Kimmel
#507
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
James Christian Kimmel is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer, and political commentator. He is the host and executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a late-night talk show which premiered on ABC on January 26, 2003, at Hollywood Masonic Temple in Hollywood, California; and on April 1, 2019, at a secondary home, the Zappos Theater on the Las Vegas Strip. Kimmel hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2012, 2016 and 2020. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 2017, 2018 and 2023.
Go to Profile#143
Girish Karnad
#995
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Girish Karnad was an Indian actor, film director, Kannada writer, playwright and a Jnanpith awardee, who predominantly worked in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi films. His rise as a playwright in the 1960s marked the coming of age of modern Indian playwriting in Kannada, just as Badal Sarkar did in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, and Mohan Rakesh in Hindi. He was a recipient of the 1998 Jnanpith Award, the highest literary honour conferred in India.
Go to Profile#144
Nick Joaquin
#2293
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Nicomedes "Nick" Marquez Joaquin was a Filipino writer and journalist best known for his short stories and novels in the English language. He also wrote using the pen name Quijano de Manila. Joaquin was conferred the rank and title of National Artist of the Philippines for Literature. He has been considered one of the most important Filipino writers, along with José Rizal and Claro M. Recto. Unlike Rizal and Recto, whose works were written in Spanish, Joaquin's major works were written in English despite being literate in Spanish.
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Gregory Nagy
#4532
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gregory Nagy is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Go to Profile#146
Margaret Drabble
#2751
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer. Drabble's books include The Millstone , which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick and plateglass universities . She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
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Larry Gelbart
#3066
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Larry Simon Gelbart was an American television writer, playwright, screenwriter, director and author, most famous as a creator and producer of the television series M*A*S*H, and as co-writer of the Broadway musicals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels.
Go to Profile#148
Ralph Ellison
#2669
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Ralph Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison wrote Shadow and Act , a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory . The New York Times dubbed him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus".
Go to Profile#149
Robin Morgan
#585
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robin Morgan is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
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Stephen Greenblatt
#1847
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
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