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,
#10351
Walter Savage Landor
1775 - 1864 (89 years)
Walter Savage Landor was an English writer, poet, and activist. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem "Rose Aylmer," but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equalled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. Both his writing and political activism, such as his support for Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, were imbued with his passion for liberal and republican causes. He befriended and influenced the next generation of literary refor...
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Thomas Kyd
1558 - 1594 (36 years)
Thomas Kyd was an English playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins, an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy, discovered that Thomas Heywood, in his Apologie for Actors , attributed the play to Kyd. A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now kno...
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John Clellon Holmes
1926 - 1988 (62 years)
John Clellon Holmes was an American author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat" and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. Holmes also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, The Horn.
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Gilbert Highet
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian. Biography Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States. He attended Hillhead High School, Glasgow, Glasgow University and, on both a Snell and a Jenkyns Exhibition, Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford career was distinguished by a First in Classical Moderations, 1930, an Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1930, the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, 1931, and a First in Literae Humaniores in 1932....
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Edward Thomas
1878 - 1917 (39 years)
Philip Edward Thomas was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
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Arthur Hugh Clough
1819 - 1861 (42 years)
Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to Florence Nightingale. He was the brother of suffragist Anne Clough and father of Blanche Athena Clough, who both became principals of Newnham College, Cambridge.
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Morley Callaghan
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Edward Morley Callaghan was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and TV and radio personality. Biography Of Canadian/English-immigrant parentage, Callaghan was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. He was educated at Withrow PS, Riverdale Collegiate Institute, the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School. He articled and was called to the Bar, but did not practice law. During the 1920s he worked at the Toronto Star where he became friends with a fellow reporter Ernest Hemingway, formerly of The Kansas City Star. Callaghan began writing stories that were well received and soon were recognized as one of the best short story writers of the day.
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Utsubo Kubota
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Utsubo Kubota was a Japanese tanka poet. He also wrote poetry in other forms, as well as prose fiction and non-fiction critical and scholarly works on Japanese classical literature. He was a lecturer at Waseda University.
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Pavel Jozef Šafárik
1795 - 1861 (66 years)
Pavel Jozef Šafárik was an ethnic Slovak philologist, poet, literary historian, historian and ethnographer in the Kingdom of Hungary. He was one of the first scientific Slavists. Family His father Pavol Šafárik was a Protestant clergyman in Kobeliarovo and before that a teacher in Štítnik, where he was also born. His mother, Katarína Káresová was born in a poor lower gentry family in Hanková and had several jobs in order to help the family in the poor region of Kobeliarovo.
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Marie Corelli
1855 - 1924 (69 years)
Mary Mackay , also called Minnie Mackey and known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli , was an English novelist. From the appearance of her first novel A Romance of Two Worlds in 1886, she became a bestselling fiction-writer, her works largely concerned with Christianity, reincarnation, astral projection and mysticism. Yet despite her many distinguished patrons, she was often ridiculed by critics. Corelli lived her later years in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose historic buildings she fought hard to preserve.
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Benjamin of Tudela
1130 - 1173 (43 years)
Benjamin of Tudela was a medieval Jewish traveler who visited Europe, Asia, and Africa in the twelfth century. His vivid descriptions of western Asia preceded those of Marco Polo by a hundred years. With his broad education and vast knowledge of languages, Benjamin of Tudela is a major figure in medieval geography and Jewish history.
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
1689 - 1762 (73 years)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Born in 1689, Lady Mary spent her early life in England. In 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Lady Mary joined her husband on the Ottoman excursion, where she was to spend the next two years of her life. During her time there, Lady Mary wrote extensively on her experience as a woman in Ottoman Constantinople. After her return to England, Lady Mary devoted her attention to the upbringing of her family before dying of cancer in 1762.
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Constantine P. Cavafy
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis , known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy , was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace."
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Laurence Binyon
1869 - 1943 (74 years)
Robert Laurence Binyon, CH was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray. He studied at St Paul's School, London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891. He worked for the British Museum from 1893 until his retirement in 1933. In 1904 he married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell, with whom he had three daughters, including the artist Nicolete Gray.
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz , commonly known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, theorist, playwright, novelist, and photographer active before World War I and during the interwar period.
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Lenny Bruce
1925 - 1966 (41 years)
Leonard Alfred Schneider , better known by his stage name Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist. He was renowned for his open, free-wheeling, and critical style of comedy which contained satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was followed by a posthumous pardon in 2003.
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Henry Adams
1838 - 1918 (80 years)
Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.
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Clarice Lispector
1920 - 1977 (57 years)
Clarice Lispector was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
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Madame d'Aulnoy
1652 - 1705 (53 years)
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French author known for her literary fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fées , she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre.
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Marius Petipa
1818 - 1910 (92 years)
Marius Ivanovich Petipa , born Victor Marius Alphonse Petipa , was a French and Russian ballet dancer, pedagogue and choreographer. Petipa is one of the most influential ballet masters and choreographers in ballet history.
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Michel Fokine
1880 - 1942 (62 years)
Michael Fokine was a Russian choreographer and dancer. Career Early years Fokine was born in Saint Petersburg to a prosperous merchant and at the age of 9 was accepted into the Saint Petersburg Imperial Ballet School. That same year, he made his performing debut in The Talisman under the direction of Marius Petipa. In 1898, on his 18th birthday, he debuted on the stage of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Paquita, with the Imperial Russian Ballet. In addition to being a talented dancer, Fokine was also passionate about painting and displayed talent in this area as well. He also played musi...
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James Weldon Johnson
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He wrote the...
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Johann Jakob Bodmer
1698 - 1783 (85 years)
Johann Jakob Bodmer was a Swiss author, academic, critic and poet. Life Born at Greifensee, near Zürich, and first studying theology and then trying a commercial career, he finally found his vocation in letters. In 1725 he was appointed professor of Helvetian history at the Carolinum academy in Zürich, a chair which he held for half a century, and in 1735 became a member of the Cantonal Council. He died at Zürich in 1783.
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Filipp Fortunatov
1848 - 1914 (66 years)
Filipp Fyodorovich Fortunatov was a Russian philologist, Indo-Europeanist and Slavist, best known for establishing the Fortunatov–de Saussure law. Biography Fortunatov was born in Vologda in 1848. His father was the director of public schools in Olonets Governorate, and Fortunatov entered the in Petrozavodsk, which was also overseen by his father.
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Thomas Bailey Aldrich
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published writers including Charles W. Chesnutt. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, which established the "bad boy's book" subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature, and for his poetry.
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Countee Cullen
1903 - 1946 (43 years)
Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Childhood Countee LeRoy Porter was born on May 30, 1903, to Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. Due to a lack of records of his early childhood, historians have had difficulty identifying his birthplace. Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Louisville, Kentucky have been cited as possibilities. Although Cullen claimed to have been born in New York City, he also frequently referred to Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace on legal applications. Cullen w...
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T. H. White
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Terence Hanbury "Tim" White was an English writer. He is best known for his Arthurian novels, which were published together in 1958 as The Once and Future King. One of his most memorable is the first of the series, The Sword in the Stone, which was published as a stand-alone book in 1938.
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Bruno Schulz
1892 - 1942 (50 years)
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
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Maria Edgeworth
1768 - 1849 (81 years)
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her firs...
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V. S. Pritchett
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett was a British writer and literary critic. Pritchett was known particularly for his short stories, collated in a number of volumes. His non-fiction works include the memoirs A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil , and many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.
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Friedrich Christian Diez
1794 - 1876 (82 years)
Friedrich Christian Diez was a German philologist. The two works on which his fame rests are the Grammar of the Romance Languages , and the Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages . He spent most of his career at University of Bonn.
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Yvor Winters
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic. Life Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and in Pasadena, where his grandparents lived. He attended the University of Chicago for four-quarters in 1917–18, where he was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and his future wife Janet Lewis. In the winter of 1918–19 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his recuperation he wrote and published some of his early poems.
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Grazia Deledda
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda , also known in Sardinian language as Gràssia or Gràtzia Deledda , was an Italian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [i.e. Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general". She was the first Italian woman to receive the prize, and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.
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Christian Fürchtegott Gellert
1715 - 1769 (54 years)
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert was a German poet, one of the forerunners of the golden age of German literature that was ushered in by Lessing. Biography Gellert was born at Hainichen in Saxony, at the foot of the Erzgebirge. After attending the school of St. Afra in Meissen, he entered Leipzig University in 1734 as a student of theology, but in 1738 Gellert broke off his studies as his family could no longer afford to support him and became a private tutor for a few years. Returning to Leipzig in 1741, he contributed to the Bremer Beiträge, a periodical founded by former disciples of Johann Christoph Gottsched who had revolted against the pedantry of his school.
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Carson McCullers
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the Deep South.
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James Stephens
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
James Stephens was an Irish novelist and poet. Life Early life James Stephens' birth is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Stephens himself claimed to have been born on the same day and same year as James Joyce , whereas he is in fact probably the same James Stephens who is on record as being born at the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, on 9 February 1880, the son of Francis Stephens of 5 Thomas's Court, Dublin, a vanman and a messenger for a stationer's office, and his wife, Charlotte Collins . His father died when Stephens was two years old, and when he was six years old, his mother remarried, and St...
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Svetozar Marković
1846 - 1875 (29 years)
Svetozar Marković was a Serbian political activist, literary critic and socialist philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
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Pu Songling
1640 - 1715 (75 years)
Pu Songling was a Chinese writer during the Qing dynasty, best known as the author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio . Biography Pu was born into a poor merchant family from Zichuan . At the age of 18, he received the Xiucai degree in the Imperial examination. It was not until he was 71 that he was awarded the Gongsheng degree for his achievement in literature rather than for passing the Imperial exam.
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Edward Carpenter
1844 - 1929 (85 years)
Edward Carpenter was an English utopian socialist, poet, philosopher, anthologist, an early activist for gay rights and prison reform whilst advocating vegetarianism and taking a stance against vivisection. As a philosopher, he was particularly known for his publication of Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure. Here, he described civilisation as a form of disease through which human societies pass.
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Alphonse de Lamartine
1790 - 1869 (79 years)
Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French author, poet, and statesman who was instrumental in the foundation of the French Second Republic and the continuation of the tricolore as the flag of France.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 - 1832 (83 years)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
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Charles Reade
1814 - 1884 (70 years)
Charles Reade was a British novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth. Life Charles Reade was born at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, to John Reade and Anne Marie Scott-Waring, and had at least four brothers. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1835, and became a fellow of his college. He was subsequently dean of arts and vice-president, taking his degree of D.C.L. in 1847. His name was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1836; he was elected Vinerian Fellow in 1842, and was called to the bar in 1843. He kept his fellowship at Magdalen all his life but, after taking his degree, he spent most of his time in London.
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Vilhelm Moberg
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Karl Artur Vilhelm Moberg was a Swedish journalist, author, playwright, historian, and debater. His literary career, spanning more than 45 years, is associated with his four-volume series The Emigrants. The novels, published between 1949 and 1959, deal with the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th century. They have been adapted for a total of three movies , and a musical.
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Wen Yiduo
1899 - 1946 (47 years)
Wen Yiduo was a Chinese poet and scholar known for his nationalistic poetry. Wen was assassinated by the Kuomintang in 1946. Life Wen Yiduo was born Wén Jiāhuá on 24 November 1899 in what is now Xishui County in Hubei Province. After receiving a traditional Chinese Confucian education he went on to continue studying at Tsinghua University.
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Felicia Hemans
1793 - 1835 (42 years)
Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet . Two of her opening lines, "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The stately homes of England", have acquired classic status. Early life and education Felicia Dorothea Browne was the daughter of George Browne, who worked for his father-in-law's wine importing business and succeeded him as Tuscan and imperial consul in Liverpool, and Felicity, daughter of Benedict Paul Wagner , wine importer at 9 Wolstenholme Square, Liverpool and Venetian consul for that city. Hemans was the fourth of six children to survive infancy. Her sister Harriett collaborated musically with Hemans and later edited her complete works .
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Flann O'Brien
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Brian O'Nolan , his pen name being Flann O'Brien, was an Irish civil service official, novelist, playwright and satirist, who is now considered a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is regarded as a key figure in modernist and postmodern literature. His English language novels, such as At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, were written under the O'Brien pen name. His many satirical columns in The Irish Times and an Irish-language novel, An Béal Bocht, were written under the name Myles na gCopaleen.
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Jasimuddin
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Jasimuddin , popularly called Palli Kabi , was a Bangladeshi poet, lyricist, composer and writer widely celebrated for his modern ballad sagas in the pastoral mode. Although his full name is Jasim Uddin Mollah, he is known as Jasim Uddin. His Nakshi Kanthar Math and Sojan Badiar Ghat are considered among the best lyrical poems in the Bengali language. He is the key figure for the revivals of pastoral literature in Bengal during the 20th century. As a versatile writer, Jasimuddin wrote poems, ballads, songs, dramas, novel, stories, memoirs, travelogues, etc.
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Anne Brontë
1820 - 1849 (29 years)
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, and the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Otherwise, she attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 lived elsewhere working as a governess. In 1846 she published a book of poems with her sisters and later two novels, initially under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 at the same time as Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë.
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Stephen Vincent Benét
1898 - 1943 (45 years)
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and "By the Waters of Babylon" . In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.
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Colley Cibber
1671 - 1757 (86 years)
Colley Cibber was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his "miserable mutilation" of "crucified Molière [and] hapless Shakespeare".
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