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,
#10251
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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Henry Fielding
1707 - 1754 (47 years)
Henry Fielding was an English writer and magistrate known for the use of humour and satire in his works. His 1749 comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was a seminal work in the genre. Along with Samuel Richardson, Fielding is seen as the founder of the traditional English novel. He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.
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Stéphane Mallarmé
1842 - 1898 (56 years)
Stéphane Mallarmé , pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
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Ford Madox Ford
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.
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François Rabelais
1494 - 1553 (59 years)
François Rabelais , has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, and diplomat, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.
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Thomas Hardy
1840 - 1928 (88 years)
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
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Robert Browning
1812 - 1889 (77 years)
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
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Paul Verlaine
1844 - 1896 (52 years)
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
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Honoré de Balzac
1799 - 1850 (51 years)
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities.
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Anna Akhmatova
1889 - 1966 (77 years)
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received the second-most nominations for the award the following year.
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Juvenal
55 - 200 (145 years)
Decimus Junius Juvenalis , known in English as Juvenal , was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the Satires. The details of Juvenal's life are unclear, although references within his text to known persons of the late first and early second centuries CE fix his earliest date of composition. One recent scholar argues that his first book was published in 100 or 101. A reference to a political figure dates his fifth and final surviving book to sometime after 127.
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Marcel Proust
1871 - 1922 (51 years)
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
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Taras Shevchenko
1814 - 1861 (47 years)
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko , also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar , was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language, though this is different from the language of his poems. Due to prosecution of the Ukrainian language, he also wrote selective works in "Great Russian" language . Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.
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Thomas Malory
1405 - 1471 (66 years)
Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author of Le Morte d'Arthur, the classic English-language chronicle of the Arthurian legend, compiled and in most cases translated from French sources. The most popular version of Le Morte d'Arthur was published by the famed London printer William Caxton in 1485. Much of Malory's life history is obscure, but he identified himself as a "knight prisoner", apparently reflecting that he was either a criminal, a prisoner-of-war, or suffering some other type of confinement. Malory's identity has never been confirmed. Since modern scholars began researchin...
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Robert Louis Stevenson
1850 - 1894 (44 years)
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.
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Théophile Gautier
1811 - 1872 (61 years)
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.
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Georg Brandes
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was a Danish critic and scholar who greatly influenced Scandinavian and European literature from the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century. He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Breakthrough" of Scandinavian culture. At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and also fantasy in literature. His literary goals were shared by some other authors, among them the Norwegian "realist" playwright Henrik Ibsen.
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Wallace Stevens
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
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Statius
45 - 96 (51 years)
Publius Papinius Statius was a Greco-Roman poet of the 1st century CE. His surviving Latin poetry includes an epic in twelve books, the Thebaid; a collection of occasional poetry, the Silvae; and an unfinished epic, the Achilleid. He is also known for his appearance as a guide in the Purgatory section of Dante's epic poem, the Divine Comedy.
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Eugene O'Neill
1888 - 1953 (65 years)
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an Irish-American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwrig...
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Kalidasa
Kālidāsa was a Gupta era, Classical Sanskrit author and playwright. His plays and poetry are primarily based on Hindu Puranas and philosophy. His surviving works consist of three plays, two epic poems and two shorter poems.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896 - 1940 (44 years)
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
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Vladimir Mayakovsky
1893 - 1930 (37 years)
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. He co-signed the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste , and wrote such poems as "A Cloud in Trousers" and "Backbone Flute" . Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and produced agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922.
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
1729 - 1781 (52 years)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg in his role at Abel Seyler's Hamburg National Theatre.
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Viktor Shklovsky
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He is one of the major figures associated with Russian formalism. Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose was published in 1925. Shklovsky himself is still praised as "one of the most important literary and cultural theorists of the twentieth century" ; "one of the most lively and irreverent minds of the last century" ; "one of the most fascinating figures of Russian cultural life in the twentieth century"
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Friedrich Hölderlin
1770 - 1843 (73 years)
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Particularly due to his early association with and philosophical influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism.
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Robert Southey
1774 - 1843 (69 years)
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
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Mikhail Bakhtin
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1...
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Ivan Turgenev
1818 - 1883 (65 years)
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection titled A Sportsman's Sketches , was a milestone of Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
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Hafez
1325 - 1389 (64 years)
Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī , known by his pen name Hafez or Hafiz, was a Persian lyric poet whose collected works are regarded by many Iranians as one of the highest pinnacles of Persian literature. His works are often found in the homes of Persian speakers, who learn his poems by heart and use them as everyday proverbs and sayings. His life and poems have become the subjects of much analysis, commentary, and interpretation, influencing post-14th century Persian writing more than any other Persian author.
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Samuel Richardson
1689 - 1761 (72 years)
Samuel Richardson was an English writer and printer known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded , Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison . He printed almost 500 works, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar. Richardson had been apprenticed to a printer, whose daughter he eventually married. He lost her along with their six children, but remarried and had six more children, of whom four daughters reached adulthood, leaving no male heirs to continue the print shop. As it ran down, he wrote his first novel at the age of 51 and joined the admired writers of his day.
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Gustave Flaubert
1821 - 1880 (59 years)
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Cornelius Quassus, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary , his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
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