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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,

#10301

Selma Lagerlöf

1858 - 1940 (82 years)

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.

#10302

Michel Leiris

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.

#10303

Hideo Kobayashi

Hideo Kobayashi

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Hideo Kobayashi was a Japanese author, who established literary criticism as an independent art form in Japan. Early life Kobayashi was born in the Kanda district of Tokyo, where his father was a noted engineer who introduced European diamond polishing technology to Japan, and who invented a ruby-based phonograph needle. Kobayashi studied French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, where his classmates included Hidemi Kon and Tatsuji Miyoshi. He met Chūya Nakahara in April 1925, with whom he quickly became close friends, but in November of the same year, began living together with Nakahara's former mistress, the actress Yasuko Hasegawa.

#10304

Georg Trakl

1887 - 1914 (27 years)

Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet and the brother of the pianist Grete Trakl. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. He is perhaps best known for his poem "Grodek", which he wrote shortly before he died of a cocaine overdose.

#10305

Hamlin Garland

1860 - 1940 (80 years)

Hannibal Hamlin Garland was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers. Biography Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860, the second of four children of Richard Garland of Maine and Charlotte Isabelle McClintock. The boy was named after Hannibal Hamlin, the vice-president under Abraham Lincoln. He lived on various Midwestern farms throughout his young life, but settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884 to pursue a c...

#10306

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte

1749 - 1838 (89 years)

Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian, later American, opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte . He was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and with Manuel Garcia, the first to introduce Italian opera to America. Da Ponte was also a close friend of Mozart and Casanova.

#10307

Ivan Krylov

1769 - 1844 (75 years)

Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best-known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent.

#10308

Velimir Khlebnikov

Velimir Khlebnikov

1885 - 1922 (37 years)

Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, better known by the pen name Velimir Khlebnikov , was a Russian poet and playwright, a central part of the Russian Futurist movement, but his work and influence stretch far beyond it. Influential linguist Roman Jakobson hailed Khlebnikov as "the greatest world poet of our century".

#10309

George Sterling

George Sterling

1869 - 1926 (57 years)

George Sterling was an American writer based in the San Francisco, California Bay Area and Carmel-by-the-Sea. He was considered a prominent poet and playwright and proponent of Bohemianism during the first quarter of the twentieth century. His work was admired by writers as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, Robinson Jeffers, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Clark Ashton Smith.

#10310

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

1830 - 1894 (64 years)

Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.

#10311

Claude McKay

1889 - 1948 (59 years)

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, McKay first travelled to the United States to attend college, and encountered W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk which stimulated McKay's interest in political involvement. He moved to New York City in 1914 and, in 1919, he wrote "If We Must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.

#10312

Hart Crane

1899 - 1932 (33 years)

Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote highly stylized modernist poetry. In his first and only long poem, The Bridge, Crane tried to write an epic poem in the style of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been praised by playwrights, poets, and literary critics .

#10313

John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry

1889 - 1957 (68 years)

John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

#10314

John Lydgate

1370 - 1450 (80 years)

John Lydgate of Bury was an English monk and poet, born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk, England. Lydgate's poetic output is prodigious, amounting, at a conservative count, to about 145,000 lines. He explored and established every major Chaucerian genre, except such as were manifestly unsuited to his profession, like the fabliau. In the Troy Book , an amplified translation of the Trojan history of the thirteenth-century Latin writer Guido delle Colonne, commissioned by Prince Henry , he moved deliberately beyond Chaucer's Knight's Tale and his Troilus, to provide a full-scale epic.

#10315

Bolesław Prus

1847 - 1912 (65 years)

Aleksander Głowacki , better known by his pen name Bolesław Prus , was a Polish novelist, a leading figure in the history of Polish literature and philosophy, as well as a distinctive voice in world literature.

#10316

Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello

1867 - 1936 (69 years)

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.

#10317

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

1925 - 1964 (39 years)

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters typically underpins the drama.

#10318

Mervyn Peake

1911 - 1968 (57 years)

Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

#10319

D. S. Mirsky

1890 - 1939 (49 years)

D. S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky , often known as Prince Mirsky , a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union. He was born in Kharkov Governorate and died in a Soviet gulag near Magadan.

#10320

E. B. White

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Elwyn Brooks White was an American writer. He was the author of several highly popular books for children, including Stuart Little , Charlotte's Web , and The Trumpet of the Swan . In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte's Web came in first in their poll of the top one hundred children's novels. In addition, he was a writer and contributing editor to The New Yorker magazine and a co-author of the English-language style guide The Elements of Style.

#10321

Evliya Çelebi

1611 - 1682 (71 years)

Derviş Mehmed Zillî , known as Evliya Çelebi , was an Ottoman explorer who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands during the empire's cultural zenith. He travelled for over a period of forty years, recording his commentary in a travelogue called the Seyahatnâme . The name Çelebi is an honorific meaning "gentleman" or "man of God".

#10322

Jules Romains

1885 - 1972 (87 years)

Jules Romains was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement. His works include the play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine, and a cycle of works called Les Hommes de bonne volonté . Sinclair Lewis called him one of the six best novelists in the world.

#10323

E. E. Cummings

1894 - 1962 (68 years)

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. Cummings, and e e Cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.

#10324

Walter F. Otto

1874 - 1958 (84 years)

Walter Friedrich Gustav Hermann Otto was a German classical philologist particularly known for his work on the meaning and legacy of Greek religion and mythology, especially as represented in his seminal 1929 work The Homeric Gods.

#10325

Ausonius

310 - 395 (85 years)

Decimius Magnus Ausonius was a Roman poet and teacher of rhetoric from Burdigala, Aquitaine . For a time, he was tutor to the future Emperor Gratian, who afterwards bestowed the consulship on him. His best-known poems are Mosella, a description of the River Moselle, and Ephemeris, an account of a typical day in his life. His many other verses show his concern for his family, friends, teachers and circle of well-to-do acquaintances and his delight in the technical handling of meter.

#10326

Eugène Scribe

1791 - 1861 (70 years)

Augustin Eugène Scribe was a French dramatist and librettist. He is known for writing "well-made plays" , a mainstay of popular theatre for over 100 years, and as the librettist of many of the most successful grand operas and opéras-comiques.

#10327

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

1832 - 1888 (56 years)

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet who wrote the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys . Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

#10328

Simonides of Ceos

Simonides of Ceos

556 BC - 468 BC (88 years)

Simonides of Ceos was a Greek lyric poet, born in Ioulis on Ceos. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria included him in the canonical list of the nine lyric poets esteemed by them as worthy of critical study. Included on this list were Bacchylides, his nephew, and Pindar, reputedly a bitter rival, both of whom benefited from his innovative approach to lyric poetry. Simonides, however, was more involved than either in the major events and with the personalities of their times.

#10329

Ibn al-Nadim

1000 - 990 (-10 years)

Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq an-Nadīm , also Ibn Abī Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Warrāq, and commonly known by the nasab Ibn an-Nadīm , was a Muslim bibliographer and biographer of Baghdad who compiled the encyclopedia Kitāb al-Fihrist .

#10330

Lord Dunsany

1878 - 1957 (79 years)

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, , commonly known as Lord Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist. He published more than 90 books during his lifetime, and his output consisted of hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, and essays. He gained a name in the 1910s as a great writer in the English-speaking world. Best known today are the 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland's Daughter, and his first book, The Gods of Pegāna, which depicts a fictional pantheon. Many critics feel his early work laid grounds for the fantasy genre.

#10331

Riichi Yokomitsu

Riichi Yokomitsu

1898 - 1947 (49 years)

Riichi Yokomitsu was an experimental, modernist Japanese writer. Yokomitsu began publishing in dōjinshi such as Machi and Tō after entering Waseda University in 1916. In 1923, he published Nichirin , Hae and more in the magazine Bungeishunjū, which made his name popular. The following year he started the magazine Bungei-Jidai with Yasunari Kawabata and others. Yokomitsu and others involved in Bungei-Jidai were known collectively as the Shinkankakuha, or the New Sensation School, with a particular interest in sensation and scientific objectivity.

#10332

Sándor Petőfi

1823 - 1849 (26 years)

Sándor Petőfi was a Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary. He is considered Hungary's national poet, and was one of the key figures of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. He is the author of the Nemzeti dal , which is said to have inspired the revolution in the Kingdom of Hungary that grew into a war for independence from the Austrian Empire. It is most likely that he died in the Battle of Segesvár, one of the last battles of the war.

#10333

John O'Hara

1905 - 1970 (65 years)

John Henry O'Hara was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his champions rank him highly among the under-appreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach li...

#10334

Ramón Menéndez Pidal

Ramón Menéndez Pidal

1869 - 1968 (99 years)

Ramón Menéndez Pidal was a Spanish philologist and historian. He worked extensively on the history of the Spanish language and Spanish folklore and folk poetry. One of his main topics was the history and legend of El Cid. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 26 separate years, thus, being the most nominated person.

#10335

Ugo Foscolo

1778 - 1827 (49 years)

Ugo Foscolo , born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and poet. He is especially remembered for his 1807 long poem Dei Sepolcri. Early life Foscolo was born in Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands. His father Andrea Foscolo was an impoverished Venetian nobleman, and his mother Diamantina Spathis was Greek.

#10336

Tudor Vianu

1898 - 1964 (66 years)

Tudor Vianu was a Romanian literary critic, art critic, poet, philosopher, academic, and translator. He had a major role on the reception and development of Modernism in Romanian literature and art. He was married to Elena Vianu, herself a literary critic, and was the father of Ion Vianu, a psychiatrist, writer and essayist.

#10337

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder

1867 - 1957 (90 years)

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.

#10338

Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno

1864 - 1936 (72 years)

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life , and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion , a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story.

#10339

Rupert Brooke

1887 - 1915 (28 years)

Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England". He died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite whilst aboard a French hospital ship moored off the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.

#10340

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

1921 - 1990 (69 years)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten, a group of left-wing Swiss writers who convened regularly at a restaurant in the city of Olten.

#10341

Harriet Monroe

1860 - 1936 (76 years)

Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which she established in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.

#10342

Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse

1887 - 1975 (88 years)

Alexis Leger , better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse , was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.

#10343

Christopher Smart

Christopher Smart

1722 - 1771 (49 years)

Christopher Smart was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.

#10344

Hidemi Kon

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Hidemi Kon was a literary critic and essayist active in Japan during the Shōwa period. Early life Born in Hakodate, Hokkaidō, Kon Hidemi was the younger brother of writer, politician and Buddhist priest Kon Tōkō. His father was a captain of a steamer operated by Nippon Yusen, and the family relocated to Kobe from 1911. Kon moved to Tokyo in 1918, and was accepted into the French Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. His classmates included Hideo Kobayashi and Tatsuji Miyoshi, During this period, he became interested in drama, visiting the Tsukiji New Theater, and took part in sta...

#10345

Nikolai Leskov

1831 - 1895 (64 years)

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms. His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , The Cathedral Folk , The Enchanted Wanderer , and "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea" .

#10346

Karen Blixen

1885 - 1962 (77 years)

Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author who wrote in Danish and English. She is also known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries, Tania Blixen, used in German-speaking countries, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.

#10347

Prudentius

348 - 413 (65 years)

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a Roman Christian poet, born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis in 348. He probably died in the Iberian Peninsula some time after 405, possibly around 413. The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta , Tarraco , or Calagurris .

#10348

Donald Wandrei

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

Donald Albert Wandrei was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the older brother of science fiction writer and artist Howard Wandrei. He had fourteen stories in Weird Tales, another sixteen in Astounding Stories, plus a few in other magazines including Esquire. Wandrei was the co-founder of the prestigious fantasy/horror publishing house Arkham House.

#10349

Edward Johnston

Edward Johnston

1872 - 1944 (72 years)

Edward Johnston, CBE was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool. He is best known as the designer of Johnston, a sans-serif typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system until the 1980s. He also redesigned the famous roundel symbol used throughout the system.

#10350

Robert Burns

1759 - 1796 (37 years)

Robert Burns , also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

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