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,
#10301
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. ...
Go to Profile#10302
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.
Go to Profile#10303
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.
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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
Go to Profile#10305
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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
Go to Profile#10309
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.
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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.
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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.
Go to Profile#10312
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.
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Vernon Watkins
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Vernon Phillips Watkins was a Welsh poet and translator. He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English".
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Frederic Ewen
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Frederic Ewen was an English professor at Brooklyn College from 1930 to 1952. During the height of the McCarthy period Ewen was forced to resign his teaching position after refusing to cooperate with a Senate Internal Security Committee investigation of communism and higher education.
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Walter de Haas
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Walter de Haas , who wrote under the pseudonym Hanns Günther, was a prolific German author, translator, and editor of popular science books. He began to publish books in 1912, including introductions to topics in electrical engineering under the Franckh'schen Verlagshandlung imprint and popular science works in the same publisher's Kosmos series. His books remain exemplary for their combination of exactness and ease of understanding.
Go to Profile#10316
Margaret Ashmun
1875 - 1940 (65 years)
Margaret Eliza Ashmun was an American writer from Rural, Wisconsin. She trained as a teacher and taught for a few years then concentrated on her writing. She edited collections of short stories and writing textbooks, and wrote dozens of poems, essays, and stories that were published in the popular magazines and newspapers of her day. She was the author of more than 18 novels for both adults and young readers, especially girls.
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James Taft Hatfield
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
James Taft Hatfield was an American philologist and professor at Northwestern University where for many years he was the head of the German Department. Although he also published works on comparative linguistics, Sanskrit, church music, and American folklore, he was primarily known for his contributions to German studies, and in particular his studies on the writings of Goethe and Wilhelm Müller and on the influence of German culture in the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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Richard von Kienle
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Richard von Kienle was a German linguist who specialized in Germanic and Indo-European linguistics. Biography Richard von Kienle was born in Freiburg, Germany on 9 February 1908. He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg in 1931 under the supervision of Hermann Güntert. von Kienle subsequently served as an assistant at the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch under . Since the summer of 1938 he was an acting professor at the University of Heidelberg, having stepped in for Güntert, who was in poor health at the time. He was later an acting professor at the University of Jena under . Since 1940...
Go to Profile#10319
Randall V. Mills
1907 - 1952 (45 years)
Randall V. Mills was a professor of literature with a variety of interests related to the Pacific Northwest, including steamboats, railroads and folklore. Early life and education Randall was born in Wisconsin in 1907. In 1929 Mills received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles . His master's degree was received from University of California, Berkeley in 1932.
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Juho August Hollo
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Juho August Hollo , also known as J. A. Hollo, was a Finnish scholar and professor of education at the University of Helsinki from 1930 to 1954. He was one of the most prolific translators into Finnish, translating a range of genres and from several languages. He himself said in 1953 that he had translated 170 books; some sources list over 300. Among the authors he translated were Miguel de Cervantes, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was als...
Go to Profile#10321
Arna Bontemps
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. They w...
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Dorothy Burr Thompson
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...
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Friedrich Münzer
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Friedrich Münzer was a German classical scholar noted for the development of prosopography, particularly for his demonstrations of how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles. He died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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Natalino Sapegno
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Natalino Sapégno was a literary critic and Italian academician. He came to prominence as a leading scholar of fourteenth century Italian literature. Biography Provenance and early years Natalino Sapégno was born in Aosta, which was the city from where his mother's family came. However, he spent his first sixteen years growing up in Turin, where his father was employed as a senior official with the government tax office. In 1917, along with his older sister Giuliana, he was entrusted, for a year, to the care of his maternal grandparents in Aosta. Here, for a year, he completed his sc...
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Enrica Malcovati
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.
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Clive Carruthers
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Clive Harcourt Carruthers was a Canadian classicist. Carruthers attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1916. He served in the Canadian Army, briefly taught at the University of Alberta, and, in 1921, started teaching at McGill University in Montreal. From 1929–1950 he served as professor of classical philology; in 1950 he became department chairman; and from 1950–1961 he was Hiram Mills professor of classics.
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Viggo Brøndal
1887 - 1942 (55 years)
Rasmus Viggo Brøndal was a Danish philologist and professor of Romance languages and literature at Copenhagen University. He was also a founder of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Background Danish linguist and language philosopher. Brøndal received a traditional education in philology but showed an early concern for theoretical problems. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding introduced him to the theory and history of philosophical categories, which was to be the basis of his theory of structural linguistics. This background made him receptive to the ideas of the prestructuralists during his studies in Paris .
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Michael de la Bédoyère
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Count Michael Anthony Maurice de la Bédoyère was an English writer, editor and journalist. Life He was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and took a first in "Modern Greats" at Campion Hall, Oxford University. His initial plans to become a Jesuit priest were abandoned. In 1930-1931 he lectured at the University of Minnesota. In 1934 he became editor of the Catholic Herald, a post he held until 1962. During this time he transformed it from one of limited regional appeal into a more challenging and intellectual newspaper, which often brought it into conflict with the more conservative members of the Roman Catholic Church.
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G. M. Hirst
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.
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William K. Wimsatt
1907 - 1975 (68 years)
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to question the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.
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Thomas Parry
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Sir Thomas Parry FBA was a Welsh writer and academic. He was Professor of Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor from 1947 to 1953, Librarian of the National Library of Wales from 1953 to 1958, Principal of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth from 1958 to 1969 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1961 to 1963 and 1967 to 1969.
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Péter Szondi
1929 - 1971 (42 years)
Péter Szondi was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary. Biography Szondi's father was the Hungarian-Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi, who settled in Switzerland after his 1944 release after five months in Bergen-Belsen.
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Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
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Joseph Edward Harry
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Joseph Edward Harry briefly served an interim term as president of the University of Cincinnati between Presidents Howard Ayers and Charles W. Dabney in 1904. Harry was dean of the college of Arts and Sciences from 1901 to 1906 and was dean of the Graduate School in 1916.
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Nurul Momen
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Nurul Momen was a Bangladeshi playwright, educator, director, broadcast personality, orator, academician, satirist, essayist, translator and poet. He served as a faculty member in the capacities of professor and dean at the faculty of Law in the University of Dhaka. He also served as a lawyer. He is called "Father of Bangladeshi theatre" and "Natyaguru" of Bangladesh . He was awarded the Bangla Academy Award in 1961, merely a year after its inception. He was also honoured by the People's Republic of Bangladesh with the Ekushey Padak in 1978, only a couple of years after this State honor was ...
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Charles S. Singleton
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Charles Southward Singleton was an American scholar, writer, and critic of literature. He was an expert on the work of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio. He wrote An Essay on the Vita Nuova and Dante Studies . He studied, as did the German critic Erich Auerbach, the allegorical interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy, a work which he also translated into English in six volumes. Irma Brandeis was one of his disciples.
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Herbert Arntson
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Herbert Edward Arntson was a writer of juvenile historical fiction from Tacoma, Washington. Arntson attended the University of Puget Sound for his undergraduate and master's degrees, both as an English major. For his doctoral degree he went to the University of Washington. He was married to Dorothy Arntson.
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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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