The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#10301
Jean-François Champollion
1790 - 1832 (42 years)
Jean-François Champollion , also known as Champollion le jeune , was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his mid-teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
Go to Profile#10302
Thomas Middleton
1580 - 1627 (47 years)
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. He, with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, was among the most successful and prolific of playwrights at work in the Jacobean period, and among the few to gain equal success in comedy and tragedy. He was also a prolific writer of masques and pageants.
Go to Profile#10303
John Clare
1793 - 1864 (71 years)
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self."
Go to Profile#10304
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
1788 - 1857 (69 years)
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff was a German poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Eichendorff was one of the major writers and critics of Romanticism. Ever since their publication and up to the present day, some of his works have been very popular in German-speaking Europe.
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Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
1636 - 1711 (75 years)
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux , often known simply as Boileau , was a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way that Blaise Pascal did to reform the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace.
Go to Profile#10306
Pierre Loti
1850 - 1923 (73 years)
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories. Biography Born to a Protestant family, Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At age 17 he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list. He was in the habit of claiming that he never read books, saying to the Académie française on the day of his introduction , "Loti ne sait pas lire" , but testimony from friends proves otherwise, as does his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort.
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Salvatore Quasimodo
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Salvatore Quasimodo was an Italian poet and translator. In 1959, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he was one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#10308
Gilbert Murray
1866 - 1957 (91 years)
George Gilbert Aimé Murray was an Australian-born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century. He is the basis for the character of Adolphus Cusins in his friend George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, and also appears as the chorus figure in Tony Harrison's play Fram.
Go to Profile#10309
Käte Hamburger
1896 - 1992 (96 years)
Käte Hamburger was a Germanist, literary scholar and philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Stuttgart. Hamburger earned her doctorate in 1922 in Munich. Expelled by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage, she immigrated to Sweden in 1934, where she lived until 1956, earning her living as a language teacher, journalist and writer. She resumed her university career on her return to Germany, writing about Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
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Mori Ōgai
1862 - 1922 (60 years)
Lieutenant-General Mori Rintarō, known by his pen name Mori Ōgai, was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist, poet and father of famed author Mari Mori. He obtained his medical license at a very young age and introduced translated German language literary works to the Japanese public. Mori Ōgai also was considered the first to successfully express the art of western poetry in Japanese. He wrote many works and created many writing styles. The Wild Geese is considered his major work. After his death, he was considered one of the leading writers who modernized Japanese lit...
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Erich Maria Remarque
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Erich Maria Remarque was a German-born novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front , based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was an international bestseller which created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. The book was adapted to film several times. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic." He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and the United States where he became a naturalized citizen.
Go to Profile#10312
Ælfric of Eynsham
950 - 1010 (60 years)
Ælfric of Eynsham was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian , Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist. In the view of Peter Hunter Blair, he was "a man comparable both in the quantity of his writings and in the quality of his mind even with Bede himself." According to Claudio Leonardi, he "represented the highest pinnacle of Benedictine reform and Anglo-Saxon literature".
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Nâzım Hikmet
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Mehmed Nâzım Ran , commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet Family According to Nâzım Hikmet, he was of paternal Turkish and maternal German, Polish and Georgian descent. His mother came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family with predominantly-Circassian roots, along with high social position and relations to the Polish nobility. From his father's side, he had Turkish heritage. His father, Hikmet Bey, was the son of Çerkes Nâzım Pasha, another Circassian, after whom Nâzım Hikmet was named.
Go to Profile#10314
Marcus Manilius
100 - 50 (-50 years)
Marcus Manilius was a Roman poet, astrologer, and author of a poem in five books called Astronomica. The Astronomica The author of Astronomica is neither quoted nor mentioned by any ancient writer. Even his name is uncertain, but it was probably Marcus Manilius; in the earlier books the author is anonymous, the later give Manilius, Manlius, Mallius. The poem itself implies that the writer lived under Augustus or Tiberius, and that he was a citizen of and resident in Rome, suggesting that Manilius wrote the work during the 20s CE. According to the early 18th century classicist Richard Bentley, he was an Asiatic Greek; according to the 19th-century classicist Fridericus Jacob, an African.
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Pietro Aretino
1492 - 1556 (64 years)
Pietro Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.
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Phillis Wheatley
1753 - 1784 (31 years)
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
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Ivan Cankar
1876 - 1918 (42 years)
Ivan Cankar was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and political activist. Together with Oton Župančič, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature. He is regarded as the greatest writer in Slovene, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.
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Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was a German classical philologist. Wilamowitz, as he is known in scholarly circles, was a renowned authority on Ancient Greece and its literature.
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Leo Spitzer
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.
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Nathaniel Parker Willis
1806 - 1867 (61 years)
Nathaniel Parker Willis , also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern. Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography while being employed as his children's nurse.
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William Michael Rossetti
1829 - 1919 (90 years)
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic. Early life Born in London, Rossetti was a son of exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and his wife Frances Rossetti née Polidori; he was the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.
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Baltasar Gracián
1601 - 1658 (57 years)
Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J. , better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud . His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
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Miroslav Krleža
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Miroslav Krleža was a Yugoslav and Croatian writer who is widely considered to be the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century. He wrote notable works in all the literary genres, including poetry , theater , short stories , novels , and an intimate diary. His works often include themes of bourgeois hypocrisy and conformism in Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Krleža wrote numerous essays on problems of art, history, politics, literature, philosophy, and military strategy, and was known as one of the great polemicists of the century. His style combines visionary poetic languag...
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John Millington Synge
1871 - 1909 (38 years)
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen , Riders to the Sea , The Well of the Saints , and The Tinker's Wedding .
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Edmund Blunden
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Edmund Charles Blunden was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.
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Luis Cernuda
1905 - 1963 (58 years)
Luis Cernuda Bidón was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain.
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Muhammad al-Bukhari
810 - 870 (60 years)
Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari , commonly referred to as Imām al-Bukhāri or Imām Bukhāri, was a 9th-century Muslim muhaddith who is widely regarded as the most important hadith scholar in the history of Sunni Islam. Al-Bukhari's extant works include the hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari, Al-Tarikh al-Kabir, and Al-Adab al-Mufrad.
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet and playwright. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on three occasions and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Early life Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine on December 22, 1869. His parents were Edward and Mary . They had wanted a girl, and did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort—at which point other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected the name "Edwin" from a hat containing a random set of boy's names. The man who drew the name was from Arlington, Massachusetts, so "Arlington" was used for his middle name.
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Mantarō Kubota
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Mantarō Kubota was a Japanese author, playwright, and poet. Early life Kubota was born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, to a clothing merchant family. He became interested in stage plays at an early age, largely due to the influence of his grandmother, who also provided financial support for him to attend college. While attending college preparatory courses, he attended lectures by Mori Ōgai and Nagai Kafū. While still a student at Keio University in 1911, he made his literary debut with the short novel Asagao and a stage play Yugi , both of which appeared in the university's journal Mita Bungaku, and which led to a long-lasting friendship and association with Takitarō Minakami.
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Heinrich Hübschmann
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Johann Heinrich Hübschmann was a German philologist. Life Hübschmann was born on 1 July 1848 at Erfurt. He studied Oriental philology at Jena, Tübingen, Leipzig, and Munich; in 1876 he became professor of Iranian languages at Leipzig, and in 1877 professor of comparative philology at Strasbourg. Hübschmann died on 20 January 1908 in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Go to Profile#10331
John Cleland
1709 - 1789 (80 years)
John Cleland was an English novelist best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him "a sly, old malcontent".
Go to Profile#10332
Joe Orton
1933 - 1967 (34 years)
John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
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DuBose Heyward
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Edwin DuBose Heyward was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.
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Tom Taylor
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Tom Taylor was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.
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Luo Guanzhong
1334 - 1400 (66 years)
Luo Ben , better known by his courtesy name Guanzhong , was a Chinese writer who lived during the Ming dynasty. He is also known by his pseudonym Huhai Sanren . Luo Guanzhong is credited with writing Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
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José Hernández
1834 - 1886 (52 years)
José Hernández was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierro. Biography Hernández, whose ancestry was Spanish, was born on a farm near San Martín . His father was a majordomo or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation.
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Rafael Obligado
1851 - 1920 (69 years)
Rafael Obligado was an Argentine poet and playwright. Obligado was the son of María Jacinta Ortiz Urién and Luis Obligado y Saavedra. During the 1880s, he became known as el poeta del Paraná . He wrote poetry with gaucho themes, but using cultured and educated language. He was heavily influenced by contemporary French poetry, and became well known in Argentina for his poem Santos Vega, an ode to a gaucho-troubadour, a type of composer and performer known in Argentina under the name of payador.
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Sholem Asch
1880 - 1957 (77 years)
Sholem Asch , also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. Life and work Asch was born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Congress Poland to Moszek Asz , a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska . Frajda was Moszek's second wife; his first wife Rude Shmit died in 1873, leaving him with either six or seven children . Sholem was the fourth of the ten children that Moszek and Frajda Malka had together. Moszek would spend all week on the road and return home every Friday in time for the Sabbath. He w...
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George Lyman Kittredge
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
George Lyman Kittredge was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England and New England.
Go to Profile#10340
Kafū Nagai
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Kafū Nagai was a Japanese writer, editor and translator. His works like Geisha in Rivalry and A Strange Tale from East of the River are noted for their depictions of life of the demimonde in early 20th-century Tokyo.
Go to Profile#10341
Albert Verwey
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Albert Verwey was a Dutch poet belonging to the "Movement of Eighty". As a translator, staffer, and literary historian he played an important role in the literary life of The Netherlands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Joseph Bédier
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Joseph Bédier was a French writer and historian of medieval France. Biography Bédier was born in Paris, France, to Adolphe Bédier, a lawyer of Breton origin, and spent his childhood in Réunion. He was a professor of medieval French literature at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland and the Collège de France, Paris .
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William Goyen
1915 - 1983 (68 years)
Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.
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Francisco Urondo
1930 - 1976 (46 years)
Francisco "Paco" Urondo was an Argentine writer and member of the Montoneros guerrilla organization. Urondo published multiple collections of poetry, short stories, theatrical works, and a novel, as well as La patria fusilada, his famous interview with the survivors of the massacre at Trelew, and his critical essay Veinte años de poesía argentina. He also collaborated in the writing of movie scripts such as Pajarito Gómez and Noche terrible, and adapted for television Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and Eça de Queiroz's Os Maias.
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Mihail Sebastian
1907 - 1945 (38 years)
Mihail Sebastian was a Romanian playwright, essayist, journalist and novelist. Life Sebastian was born to a Jewish family in Brăila, the son of Mendel and Clara Hechter. After completing his secondary education, Sebastian studied law in Bucharest, but was soon attracted to the literary life and the exciting ideas of the new generation of Romanian intellectuals, as epitomized by the literary group Criterion which included Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Eugène Ionesco. Sebastian published several novels, including Accidentul and Orașul cu salcâmi , heavily influenced by French novelists such a...
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Johannes Aavik
1880 - 1973 (93 years)
Johannes Aavik was an Estonian philologist and Fennophile who played an influential role in the modernization and development of the Estonian language. Education and career Aavik studied history at the University of Tartu and the University of Nezin in 1905. He was a member of the Young Estonia movement and obtained a Doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Helsinki in 1910. Aavik taught Estonian and French at Tartu University between 1926 and 1933. In 1934 he was appointed by the Estonian Ministry of Education as Chief Inspector of Secondary Schools, a position he held until 1940.
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Shōhei Ōoka
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Shōhei Ōoka was a Japanese novelist, literary critic, and lecturer and translator of French literature who was active during the Shōwa period of Japan. Ōoka belongs to the group of postwar writers whose World War II experiences at home and abroad figure prominently in their works. Over his lifetime, he contributed short stories and critical essays to almost every literary magazine in Japan.
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Karel Sabina
1813 - 1877 (64 years)
Karel Sabina was a Czech writer and journalist. Life Karel Sabina grew up in poverty as an extramarital child of a daughter of a sugar producing factory's director in the family of a bricklayer and a washerwoman. Sabina later claimed that he was an illegitimate son of a Polish noble. Studied philosophy and law, but did not graduate. In 1848 Sabina became one of the leaders of the Czech radical democrats, the founder of a secret radical political circle "Repeal" , a member of the National Committee and the Czech congress. Sabina published many articles to magazines during this period.
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Emir Rodríguez Monegal
1921 - 1985 (64 years)
Emir Rodríguez Monegal , born in Uruguay, was a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal .
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Charles Péguy
1873 - 1914 (41 years)
Charles Pierre Péguy was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.
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