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,
#10051
Amy Clarke
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Amy Key Clarke was an English mystical poet and writer, and a teacher at The Cheltenham Ladies' College. Early life and education Clarke was born at 121 Elgin Crescent, Kensington, London, England to Henry Clarke, a lecturer and tutor, and his wife Amy , a writer and first headmistress of Truro High School.
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Henry Bellamann
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Heinrich Hauer Bellamann was an American author, whose bestselling 1940 novel Kings Row exposed the hypocrisy of small-town life in the midwest, addressing many social taboos. Research suggested that Bellamann was working off resentment of his upbringing in Fulton, Missouri, where he had been ostracised for his German extraction and rumoured illegitimacy. The 1942 film version gave Ronald Reagan a starring role, regarded as his most memorable performance.
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Marion Vera Cuthbert
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Marion Vera Cuthbert was an American writer and intellectual associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Cuthbert was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1920. She subsequently became principal of Burrel Normal School, then Dean of Women at Talladega College. In 1933, she delivered an address at the NAACP national convention entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." Cuthbert later received her master's degree and Doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro College Graduate," was a sociological study of the effects of education on the lives of African-American women.
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Edward Collingwood
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbriann family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.
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Hedwig Voegt
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt was a German literary scholar who obtained a doctorate in German-Jacobin literature when she was 49 and became a university professor at Leipzig University. While she was a younger woman, modest family circumstances ruled out an academic career. During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist , serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.
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Giuseppe Ungaretti
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as , he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Like many futurists, he took an irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, .
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Siegfried Gutenbrunner
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Siegfried Gutenbrunner was an Austrian philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Siegfried Gutenbrunner was born in Vienna, Austria on 26 May 1906. He gained his PhD in Germanistics at the University of Vienna in 1931.
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Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt was a German classical archaeologist and art historian born in Hanover. He specialized in ancient Greek art, particularly sculpture and art from the "Parthenon era" . He was the son of archaeologist Carl Schuchhardt .
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Anne Carroll Moore
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Anne Carroll Moore was an American educator, writer and advocate for children's libraries. She was named Annie after an aunt, and officially changed her name to Anne in her fifties, to avoid confusion with Annie E. Moore, another woman who was also publishing material about juvenile libraries at that time. From 1906 to 1941 she headed children's library services for the New York Public Library system. Moore wrote Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, one of two runners-up for the 1925 Newbery Medal.
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Samuel French Morse
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Samuel French Morse was an American poet and teacher. He had the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize named in his honor, which lasted from 1983–2009. The prize was for a first or second book of poems by a U.S. poet, with a $1000 cash award, and publication of the winning manuscript by Northeastern University Press/UPNE.
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Ernesto Montenegro
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ernesto Montenegro was a Chilean journalist and writer associated with the Generation of 1912. Career Ernesto Montenegro spent much of his life in the United States, where he served as a journalist and founded a magazine named Chile.
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Richard M. Weaver
1910 - 1963 (53 years)
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher, and a mid-20th century conservative and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist during his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual , a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society.
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Charles E. Bennett
1858 - 1921 (63 years)
Charles Edwin Bennett was an American classical scholar and the Goldwin Smith Professor of Latin at Cornell University. He is best remembered for his book New Latin Grammar, first published in 1895 and still in print .
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Cecil Day-Lewis
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Cecil Day-Lewis , often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.
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William Macneile Dixon
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
William Macneile Dixon was a British writer and academic. Biography Dixon was born in India, the only son of the Reverend William Dixon and attended Methodist College Belfast. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, where he was twice Vice-Chancellor's Prizeman in English verse, Downes' Prizeman, and Elrington Prizeman, and graduated First-Class, with the First Senior Moderatorship, in the Modern Literature School, and Second Class, with the Junior Moderatorship, in the Mental and Moral Science School in 1890. He also took considerable part in the public life of the university: he was Presiden...
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John Nevin Schaeffer
1882 - 1942 (60 years)
John Nevin Schaeffer was an American classicist from Danville, Pennsylvania who spent his career teaching at Franklin & Marshall College, from which he also received his bachelor's degree in 1903. He would later receive a second degree from Oriel College at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. With Henry Lamar Crosby, whom he met while teaching summer courses at the University of Pennsylvania, he authored Introduction to Greek, a popular textbook on ancient Greek which remained in print for 20 years following its publication.
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Grant Showerman
1870 - 1935 (65 years)
Grant Showerman Ph.D. was an American classical scholar. Career overview Grant Showerman was born in Brookfield, Wisconsin in 1870. He was educated at Carroll College and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked as instructor in Latin , and from 1909 until his death as professor of classics. Showerman House in Kronshage Hall is named after him.
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Lord David Cecil
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH was a British biographer, historian, and scholar. He held the style of "Lord" by courtesy, as a younger son of a marquess. Early life and studies David Cecil was the youngest of the four children of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury, and the former Lady Cicely Gore . His siblings were Lady Beatrice Edith Mildred Cecil , Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury and Lady Mary Alice Cecil . Cecil was a delicate child, suffering from a tubercular gland in his neck at the age of 8 years, and after an operation he spent a great d...
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Arthur A. Ageton
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Arthur Ainslie Ageton was a naval officer, ambassador, writer, and writing teacher. He was the United States Ambassador to Paraguay from September 9, 1954, to April 10, 1957. He was also a rear admiral in the Navy.
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Herbert Read
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
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C. A. J. Gadolin
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Carl Axel Johan Gadolin was a Finnish doctor of philosophy and a writer in Swedish. He also used the pseudonyms Alexander Gaditz and Kristian Ulfsby. Gadolin was born in Espoo to professor Alexander Gadolin and Signe Adéle von Alfthan. He graduated in 1916 with a master's degree in philosophy in 1920 and a licentiate and doctorate in 1937. He married Ingrid Mary Anita Stackelberg on 30 July 1924, with whom he had three children: Bo Wolter Alexander, Ingegerd Rubia Anitra, and Innet Iza Helena.
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Joseph Campbell
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Joseph John Campbell was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces , in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.
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Avrahm Yarmolinsky
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Avrahm Yarmolinsky was an author, translator, and the husband of Babette Deutsch. He attended the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland before emigrating to USA in 1913. He received a bachelor's degree from City College of New York in 1916 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1921. He married Babette Deutsch in 1921
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Dan Pagis
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Dan Pagis was an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor. Biography Dan Pagis was born in Rădăuţi, Bukovina in Romania and imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and immigrated to British Palestine in 1946.
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Amos Russel Wells
1862 - 1933 (71 years)
Amos Russel Wells was a United States editor, author and professor. He graduated from Antioch College in 1883. He was professor of Greek and geology at Antioch College from 1883 to 1891 and from 1891 editor of the Christian Endeavor World, Boston. From 1901, he was associate author of Peloubet's Notes on the Sunday School Lessons. He was a member of the International Sunday-School Lesson Committee. He was a voluminous author, no less than 63 titles being credited to his pen. His works include books dealing with young people's work, the Sunday school, juvenile fiction, poetry and devotional li...
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Frank Gardner Moore
1865 - 1955 (90 years)
Frank Gardner Moore was an American Latin scholar. After teaching at Yale University, Dartmouth College, and Trinity College, Connecticut, he became a professor of Classical Philology at Columbia University.
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Park Chong-hwa
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Park Chong-hwa was an early-modern Korean poet and novelist. Life Park Chong-hwa was born October 29, 1901, in Seoul, Korea. Park wrote under the name Woltan and attended the Huimun Uisuk Academy. He worked as a member of the literary club Swan and was the vice-chairman of the Choson Writers' Association in 1946. He also served as the Chairman of the Seoul Committee for Arts and the Writers' Association of Korea . Park was named the President of the Korea Arts Council and Chairman of the Board of the Korean Writers' Association . He died on January 13, 1981.
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Phoebe Sheavyn
1865 - 1968 (103 years)
Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn was a British literary scholar and feminist. She was a professor at Victoria University of Manchester. She was a founding member of the British Federation of University Women.
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Percy MacKaye
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Percy MacKaye was an American dramatist and poet. Biography MacKaye was born in New York City into a theatrical family. His father, Steele MacKaye, was a popular actor, playwright, and producer, while his mother, Mary, wrote a dramatization of Pride and Prejudice, first produced in 1910. His brother James MacKaye was a philosopher, while brother Benton MacKaye was a forester and conservationist. His sister, Hazel MacKaye, became a women's suffrage leader and pageant director.
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Régis Messac
1893 - 1945 (52 years)
Régis Messac was a French essayist, poet and translator. Published works StudiesLe « Detective Novel » et l'influence de la pensée scientifique ; new edition, corrected and annotated, preface by Claude Amoz, postface by François Guérif: Influences française dans l'œuvre d'Edgar Poe Micromégas Brève histoire des hommes Esquisse d'une chronobibliographie des Utopies La Révolution culturelle Les Romans de l’homme-singe, pref. by Marc Angenot Les Premières Utopies, pref. by Serge Lehman PoetryPoèmes guerriers PamphletÀ bas le latin ! ; new edition, established, presented and completed by Olivier Messac, pref.
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Shūōshi Mizuhara
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Shūōshi Mizuhara was a Japanese haiku poet and physician. Shūōshi Mizuhara was born on October 9, 1892, in Tokyo. Shūōshi's father was a doctor and raised Shūōshi to follow in his footsteps, eventually taking over his medical practice. Shūōshi graduated with an MD from Tokyo University in 1926, specializing in obstetrics and gynaecology. He became a professor at Showa Medical College in 1928 and was appointed medical advisor for the Ministry of the Imperial Household in 1932. Following World War II, Shūōshi gave up his medical practice to focus on poetry.
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Edith R. Mirrielees
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Professor Edith Ronald Mirrielees was a pioneering teacher of creative writing; she inspired many talented, distinguished students, including novelist John Steinbeck at Stanford University. Biography Edith Ronald Mirrielees was born on September 10, 1878, in Pittsfield, Illinois, and grew up in Big Timber, Montana.
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Percy Mansell Jones
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Percy Mansell Jones was a Welsh Professor of French. He was born 11 April 1889 at Carmarthen to Arnaud Johnson Jones and his wife. He started his education at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Carmarthen before going on to gain a first-class honours degree in French in 1908 at Aberystwyth University. He later went on to achieving a master's degree. After his time at Aberystwyth, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a B.Litt.
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Jure Kaštelan
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Juraj "Jure" Kaštelan was a Croatian poet and writer. Education and career Juraj "Jure" Kaštelan was born on 18 December 1919 in Zakučac in Dalmatia. He attended primary school in Split and then matriculated to the Zagreb Faculty of Arts, but the war interrupted his studies. In 1942 he joined the National Liberation Struggle and worked with the Partisan press. After the war, he completed his degree in Slavic languages and worked as a reporter for the newspaper Vjesnik, as an editor for a publishing company called “Nopok,” and then as the assistant Chair of the department of Yugoslav literature at the Faculty of Arts in Zagreb.
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Milada Součková
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Milada Součková was a Czech writer, literary historian, and diplomat. She is known mainly for introducing to Czech literature Modernist techniques employed by English-language writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
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Ole Edvart Rølvaag
1876 - 1931 (55 years)
Ole Edvart Rølvaag was a Norwegian-American novelist and professor who became well known for his writings regarding the Norwegian American immigrant experience. Ole Rolvaag is most frequently associated with Giants in the Earth, his award-winning, epic novel of Norwegian immigrant homesteaders in Dakota Territory.
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Alaíde Foppa
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Alaíde Foppa was a Guatemalan poet, writer, feminist, art critic, teacher and translator. Born in Barcelona, Spain she held Guatemalan citizenship and lived in exile in Mexico. She worked as a professor in both Guatemala and Mexico. Much of her poetry was published in Mexico and she co-founded one of the first feminist publications, Fem, in the country. After her husband's death, she made a trip to Guatemala to see her mother and renew her passport. She was detained and disappeared in Guatemala City on 19 December 1980, presumed to be murdered. Some sources note the date of her disappearance ...
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Jun Ishikawa
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Jun Ishikawa was the pen name of a modernist author, translator and literary critic active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Ishikawa Kiyoshi. Early life Ishikawa was born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo as the son of a banker. He graduated from the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages with a degree in French literature. After graduation, he served a tour of duty in the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1922 to 1923, following which he was hired by Fukuoka University as a professor of French literature. His early career involved translating works such as Anatole France's Le lys rouge and auth...
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F. W. Dupee
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Frederick Wilcox Dupee was a distinguished American literary critic, essayist for Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, and professor of English at Columbia University. He evolved from radical Marxist penning political essays to highly respected literary critic.
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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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