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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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#10251

Ignacio Bolívar

Ignacio Bolívar

1850 - 1944 (94 years)

Ignacio Bolívar y Urrutia was a Spanish naturalist and entomologist, and one of the founding fathers of Spanish entomology. He helped found the Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural in 1871, and was the author of several books and of over 1000 species.

#10252

Henry Seidel Canby

1878 - 1961 (83 years)

Henry Seidel Canby was a critic, editor, and Yale University professor. A scion of a Quaker family that arrived in Wilmington, Delaware, around 1740 and grew to regional prominence through milling and business affairs, Henry Seidel Canby was a son of Edward T. Canby. Canby was born in Wilmington, and attended Wilmington Friends School. He graduated from Yale in 1899, then taught at the university until becoming a professor in 1922.

#10253

Otto Brendel

1901 - 1973 (72 years)

Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...

#10254

Charlton Hinman

1911 - 1977 (66 years)

Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman was the editor of the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles and The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare. He is well known as the inventor of the Hinman Collator. Hinman attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, receiving both his bachelor's and master's degrees there. He later received his doctoral degree in 1941 from the University of Virginia, as Fredson Bowers' first Ph.D. candidate. He was associated with the Folger Shakespeare Library and was professor of English at the University of Kansas from 1960 to 1976.

#10255

Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar

1903 - 1987 (84 years)

Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980.

#10256

Alfred Paul Dorjahn

1894 - 1986 (92 years)

Alfred Paul Dorjahn was an American classicist. In 1924 he completed his PhD at the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation was The Athenian Political Amnesty of 403 BC. External links Review of Forgiveness in old Athens. The Amnesty of 403BCby Dorjahn , Cloché Paul, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 1949, Volume 27, Numéro 1, pp. 221–223

#10257

A. Y. Campbell

1885 - 1958 (73 years)

Archibald Young Campbell was a classical scholar, translator, and published poet of the 1920s and 1930s. Life Campbell was born at Blantyre, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1885, and received his education at Hamilton Academy and Fettes College, in Edinburgh.

#10258

Charles Christopher Mierow

1883 - 1961 (78 years)

Charles Christopher Mierow was an American academic and classical scholar. He had a Princeton Ph.D. in classical languages and literature, and was known as a translator. In years the 1923-1924 and 1925-1934 he was president of Colorado College. He was appointed professor of biography at Carleton College, a position he held from 1935 to 1951.

#10259

Thomas Marc Parrott

1866 - 1960 (94 years)

Thomas Marc Parrott was a prominent twentieth-century American literary scholar, long a member of the faculty of Princeton University in New Jersey. Life and work T. M. Parrott was born and raised in Ohio, the son of Col. Edwin A. Parrott, Civil War veteran, politician , and centenarian. The younger Parrott graduated from the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton, in 1888, and was head of the preparatory department of Miami University from 1888-1890. At Miami, he was considered part of the "dude faculty" of young eastern professors brought to the school upon its reopening after a twelve-year hiatus.

#10260

Arno Schirokauer

1899 - 1954 (55 years)

Arno Fritz Kurt Schirokauer was a German-Jewish literary scholar, best known for his biography of Ferdinand Lassalle. In 1939, Schirokauer managed to travel to Havana, Cuba and on to Memphis. There he taught at Southwestern College as a Visiting Lecturer in Medieval Studies - his salary provided by other Jews in Memphis, since college rules prohibited non-Christian faculty - until he moved on to the Carl Schurz Foundation of Philadelphia. He taught at Yale University from 1941 to 1943, at Kenyon College from 1943 to 1944, at Yale again 1944 to 1945, and at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 u...

#10261

Vivian Mercier

1919 - 1989 (70 years)

Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born at Clara in County Offaly and educated, first, at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and then, at Trinity College Dublin. He was elected a Scholar of the college in 1938, and edited the student magazine T.C.D. Miscellany.

#10262

Walker Percy

1916 - 1990 (74 years)

Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.

#10263

Roger Burlingame

1889 - 1967 (78 years)

William Roger Burlingame was a prolific author, writer, and biographer. Burlingame served as the book editor at Scribner's Magazine . After leaving his job at Scribner's, Burlingame authored 25 books, including biographies and works of historical non-fiction. He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

#10264

Hutton Webster

1875 - 1955 (80 years)

David Hutton Webster was an American sociologist, economist and anthropologist. He was Lecturer Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University. Biography David Hutton Webster was born in Malone, New York on March 24, 1875. He went to California in 1893, receiving a A. B. from Stanford University in 1896, where he subsequently served as an assistant in economics from 1899 to 1900. From 1902 he was a teaching fellow in economics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1904. For the next three years Webster was Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

#10265

Leiv Amundsen

1898 - 1987 (89 years)

Leiv Amundsen was a Norwegian librarian and philologist. He was born in Tjøme as a son of sailmaker Carl Amundsen and Henrikke Elise Andersen . He attended upper secondary school in Drammen, and worked at the University Library of Oslo at the same time as studying classical philology at the Royal Frederick University. He never actually graduated from the university, but was instead promoted manager of the manuscript collection at the University Library in 1923. He specialized in papyrology, first as the assistant of Samson Eitrem. He was a research fellow with Rockefeller grants from 1926 to 1929, and studied abroad.

#10266

Benedict Wallet Vilakazi

Benedict Wallet Vilakazi

1906 - 1947 (41 years)

Benedict Wallet Vilakazi was a South African novelist, linguist, a descendant of the Zulu royal family, and a radically innovative poet who created a combination of traditional and Romantic poetry in the Zulu language. Vilakazi was also a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became the first Black South African to teach University classes to White South Africans. In 1946, Vilakazi also became the first Black South African to receive a PhD.

#10267

Edith Philips

1892 - 1983 (91 years)

Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.

#10268

Walter Clyde Curry

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Walter Clyde Curry was an American academic, medievalist, and poet. He was a member of the Fugitives and the author of four books. Early life Walter Clyde Curry was born in 1887 in Gray Court, South Carolina. He graduated from Wofford College, and he earned a master's degree and PhD from Stanford University.

#10269

Stephen Leacock

Stephen Leacock

1869 - 1944 (75 years)

Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humorist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.

#10270

Rudolf Tombo Jr.

1875 - 1914 (39 years)

Rudolf Tombo Jr. was a German-born American philologist who was associate professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University. Biography Rudolf Tombo Jr. was born in Barmen, Germany, on October 24, 1875. His father, Rudolf Tombo Sr, was a graduate of the University of Rostock and an instructor in German. As a child Tombo Jr. accompanied his family to the United States, where his father held positions at Columbia University.

#10271

Moses Finley

1912 - 1986 (74 years)

Sir Moses Israel Finley was an American-born British academic and classical scholar. His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security during the 1950s, resulted in his relocation to England, where he became an English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable publication is The Ancient Economy in which he argued that the economy in antiquity was governed by status and civic ideology, rather than rational economic motivations.

#10272

Walter Baetke

1884 - 1978 (94 years)

Walter Hugo Hermann Baetke was a German historian of religion who specialized in Germanic studies. He was Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Leipzig. Life and career Baetke's father, Wilhelm Baetke, was a police official. Baetke attended a gymnasium in Stettin. From 1902 to 1907, Baetke studied Germanic studies, English studies, education and philosophy at the Universities of Halle and Berlin, graduating from Halle in 1907 with a qualification to teach in higher education and earning a doctorate in English there in 1908 with a thesis on children in the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors.

#10273

Elizabeth Hazelton Haight

Elizabeth Hazelton Haight

1872 - 1964 (92 years)

Elizabeth Hazelton "Hazel" Haight was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Latin teaching. She spent most of her career working for Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Haight was the second female president of the American Philological Association, and first woman to chair the Advisory Council of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. She published eleven books in the field of Classics, as well as histories of Vassar and James Monroe Taylor. Her works focused on Latin Literature and the Greek novel, before she began the study of symbolism in Latin literature in her final publications.

#10274

George Abbe

1911 - 1989 (78 years)

George Bancroft Abbe was an American poet and novelist. Life He was graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1933 and from the University of Iowa in 1938. He taught at Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, University of Connecticut, Wayne State University, Columbia University, University of Maine, Springfield College, Central Connecticut State College, Russell Sage College, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

#10275

Israel Davidson

1870 - 1939 (69 years)

Israel Davidson was an American writer and publisher of Lithuanian Jewish heritage. He has been recognized as one of the leading American Hebrew writers in his era. His magnum opus was the four volume Otsar ha-shirah veha-piyut = Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry .

#10276

Melville Richards

1910 - 1973 (63 years)

Grafton Melville Richards was a Welsh scholar in the field of Welsh language and literature and Celtic studies. Early life He was born on 29 September 1910 as the third son of William and Elizabeth Richards in Ffair-fach, Llandybie, Llandeilo, Carms. Grafton Melville Richards married Ethyn Anne Bowen in Llanelli in July 1939 and had a son and daughter. He was educated at Neath Grammar School and went onto achieve a first-class Honours degree in Welsh from the University College of Swansea, starting in 1928 and finishing in 1931.

#10277

Howard Spring

1889 - 1965 (76 years)

Howard Spring was a Welsh author and journalist who wrote in English. He began his writing career as a journalist but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels for adults and children. The most successful was Fame Is the Spur , which was later adapted into a film starring Michael Redgrave and, later still a BBC TV series starring Tim Pigott-Smith and David Hayman.

#10278

Eleanor Duckett

1880 - 1976 (96 years)

Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...

#10279

W. Cabell Greet

1901 - 1972 (71 years)

William Cabell Greet was an American philologist and a professor of English. He graduated as valedictorian with a bachelor's degree in 1920 from Sewanee's University of the South. In the early 1920s he was an instructor at the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, and the University of California. At Columbia University he graduated with M.A. in 1924 and Ph.D. in 1926. He joined Barnard College's faculty in 1926, was appointed McIntosh Professor of English in 1953, and was department chair until he became professor emeritus in 1966.

#10280

Johannes Hoops

1865 - 1949 (84 years)

Johannes Hoops was a German philologist who was Professor of English philology at the University of Heidelberg. He is best known as the publisher of the first edition of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde .

#10281

Allan Seager

1906 - 1968 (62 years)

Allan Seager was an American novelist and short story writer based in Michigan. His stories were published in such leading magazines as The New Yorker and Esquire. He also taught creative writing to generations of students at the University of Michigan from 1935 to 1968.

#10282

Ajit Dutta

1907 - 1979 (72 years)

Ajit Kumar Dutta, known as Ajit Dutta, was a prominent Bengali poet, writer, essayist and professor. Early life Ajit Dutta passed the entrance examination from Kishorilal Jubilee School in Dhaka in 1924 and was admitted to the Jagannath College . After passing the Higher Secondary, he moved to Calcutta in 1926 and was admitted to Vidyasagar College with Honors in English. But within a few days, after the death of his elder brother, he returned to Dhaka and was admitted in the Bangla and Sanskrit department of Dhaka University. Ajit Dutt placed first in first class in BA in 1926 and MA in 193...

#10283

Silva Tipple New Lake

Silva Tipple New Lake

1898 - 1983 (85 years)

Silva Tipple New Lake was an American classics professor, archaeologist, and scholar of the New Testament. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, for work on Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.

#10284

Josef Svennung

1895 - 1985 (90 years)

Josef Gusten Algot Svennung was a Swedish classical philologist. He was Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Uppsala University from 1944 to 1961. Svennung is particularly known for his research on what Jordanes and other classical writers wrote about Scandza and the rest of Northern Europe.

#10285

Bernard Grebanier

1903 - 1977 (74 years)

Bernard Grebanier was an American drama historian, critic, writer, theater director and poet, most notable for his studies of the works of William Shakespeare. He wrote music and 28 books. Career Grebanier was a professor of English at Brooklyn College from 1926 until 1964. He was a prolific critic during and after his academic career.

#10286

I. J. Kapstein

1904 - 1983 (79 years)

Israel James "IJ" Kapstein was a novelist, professor, and Hebrew scholar at Brown University. Early life Israel James Kapstein was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With a childhood friend, S. J. Perelman, he attended Classical High School and Brown University. In college he wrote for the literary supplement of the Brown Daily Herald, contributed to the book review page of The Brown Jug, and was editor of Casements.

#10287

A. J. M. Smith

1902 - 1980 (78 years)

Arthur James Marshall Smith was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism."

#10288

Concha Meléndez

Concha Meléndez

1895 - 1983 (88 years)

Dr. Concha Meléndez was an educator, poet, and writer. She was the first woman to belong to the Puerto Rican Academy of Languages. Early years Meléndez was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she received her primary and secondary education. After graduating from high school she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico where she earned her teacher's certificate.

#10289

Flora Belle Ludington

Flora Belle Ludington

1898 - 1967 (69 years)

Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964. Life Born in Huron County, Michigan, Ludington moved to Wenatchee, Washington, as a young girl. At fourteen, she began her library career as a volunteer in the Carnegie public library in Wanatchee. She worked as an assistant in the University of Washington library, where she received a bachelor's degree in librarianship in 1920. She left Washington to be a reference librarian at Mills College, where she went on to study and receive a master's degree in history fin 1925.

#10290

Jacques Ehrmann

Jacques Ehrmann

1931 - 1972 (41 years)

Jacques Ehrmann was a French literary theorist and a faculty member of the Yale University French Department from 1961 until his death in 1972. Biography Jacques Ehrmann was born in Mulhouse on 31 March 1931, the son of Paul Ehrmann and Henriette Weber. Born in the Alsace region by a twist of fate, as both the Ehrmann and Weber families were originally from Alsace but had left after the 1871 loss to Germany, it just happened that Mulhouse, then Strasbourg, were the first assignments of his father, an Engineering graduate from "École Polytechnique".

#10291

Jean Boutière

1898 - 1967 (69 years)

Jean Boutière was a French philologist, and was a specialist in Romance philology. He was born in Mallemort, Bouches-du-Rhône in France. Jean Boutière was born 1 November 1898 in the area of the department Mallemort, Bouche-du-Rhone. After finishing high school in Marseille, he followed the facilty of letters to Aix and Toulouse, taking his license in philology in 1920. In the same year, Boutière became a professor at the French University Mission in Romania and taught the French language at Emanoil Gojdu University in Oradea, instead of Pascal Zigliara, who was transferred to Cluj. In Oradea...

#10292

Sten Bodvar Liljegren

1885 - 1984 (99 years)

Sten Bodvar Liljegren was a Swedish Anglist. He was born in Orrefors, Sweden. Liljegren was Professor of English Philology at the University of Greifswald between 1926 and 1930. He became a professor at Columbia University in New York and was appointed in 1931 as professor in Leipzig. He was appointed in 1939 as professor of English at the Uppsala University. He became emeritus in 1951.

#10293

Ettore Bignone

1879 - 1953 (74 years)

Ettore Bignone was an Italian classical philologist and man of letters. Early life and career Ettore Bignone was born to Carlo and Anita Matteucci. He graduated in Classical Literature in Turin, with a dissertation on Lucretius, in 1901 and in Philosophy in 1902. He then began his training as a teacher, from a gymnasium in Sicily at the Manzoni high school in Milan. He later joined the University of Pavia before Giuseppe Fraccaroli and Carlo Pascal.

#10294

Walter Arthur Berendsohn

1884 - 1984 (100 years)

Walter Arthur Berendsohn was a German literary scholar. He was an active member of the Deutsche Liga fur Menschenrechte , a spinoff of the pacifist Bund Neues Vaterland, until 1933 when he fled for Sweden when the group was dissolved by Nazis.

#10295

José Moreno Villa

José Moreno Villa

1887 - 1955 (68 years)

José Moreno Villa was a Spanish poet and member of the Generation of '27. He was a man of many talents: narrator, essayist, literary critic, artist, painter, columnist, researcher, archivist, librarian and archaeologist. He also taught at universities in the United States and México.

#10296

Giuseppe Prezzolini

Giuseppe Prezzolini

1882 - 1982 (100 years)

Giuseppe Prezzolini was an Italian literary critic, journalist, editor and writer. He later became an American citizen. Biography Prezzolini was born in Perugia in January 1882, to Tuscan parents from Siena, Luigi and Emilia Pianigiani. In 1903 he founded together with Giovanni Papini the literary journal Leonardo. In 1908 he founded La Voce, a cultural and literary journal that grew to become very influential.

#10297

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz

1913 - 1966 (53 years)

Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer. Early life Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. He had a younger brother, Kenneth. In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore inherited only a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. Accordi...

#10298

Caroline Brady

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Caroline Agnes Brady was an American philologist who specialised in Old English and Old Norse works. Her works included the 1943 book The Legends of Ermanaric, based on her doctoral dissertation, and three influential papers on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University, among other places.

#10299

Matthias Gelzer

1886 - 1974 (88 years)

Matthias Gelzer was a Swiss-German classical historian, known for his studies of the Roman Republic in regard to its politics and society. He was the author of highly regarded biographies on Julius Caesar, Pompey and Cicero.

#10300

David Hughes Parry

1893 - 1973 (80 years)

Sir David Hughes Parry was a university administrator, Professor of Law and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1945 to 1948. He was also founder of the university's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in 1947.

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