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,
#10351
Fujiwara no Teika
1162 - 1241 (79 years)
Fujiwara no Sadaie, better-known as Fujiwara no Teika , was a Japanese anthologist, calligrapher, literary critic, novelist, poet, and scribe of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. His influence was enormous, and he is counted as among the greatest of Japanese poets, and perhaps the greatest master of the waka form – an ancient poetic form consisting of five lines with a total of 31 syllables.
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Georg Curtius
1820 - 1885 (65 years)
Georg Curtius was a German philologist and distinguished comparativist. Biography Curtius was born in Lübeck, and was the brother of the historian and archeologist Ernst Curtius. After an education at Bonn and Berlin, he was for three years a schoolmaster in Dresden, until he returned to Berlin University as privatdocent. In 1849 he was placed in charge of the Philological Seminary at Prague, and two years later was appointed professor of classical philology in Prague University. In 1854, he moved from Prague to a similar appointment at Kiel, and again in 1862 from Kiel to Leipzig. He was teaching lndo-European and the historical grammar of the classical languages at Leipzig.
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Clément Marot
1495 - 1544 (49 years)
Clément Marot was a French Renaissance poet. Biography Youth Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496–1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen region and was also a poet. Jean held the post of escripvain to Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Clément was the child of his second wife. The boy was "brought into France" — it is his own expression, and is not unnoteworthy as showing the strict sense in which that term was still used at the beginning of the 16th century — in 1506.
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Anna Seghers
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Anna Seghers , is the pseudonym of a German writer notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City .
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1900 - 1944 (44 years)
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , was a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight. They were translated into many languages.
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Harry Thurston Peck
1856 - 1914 (58 years)
Harry Thurston Peck was an American classical scholar, author, editor, historian and critic. Biography Peck was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He was educated in private schools and at Columbia College, graduating in 1881, where his literary gifts attracted wide attention. His address at the conclusion of that year's commencement exercises was "witty, pathetic, and full of clever allusions" according to the New York Times. "Bouquets fell at his feet by the score as he bowed his way off the stage." Upon graduation, he immediately joined the faculty as a Latin tutor, becoming a professor in 1888.
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James Hogg
1770 - 1835 (65 years)
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorised biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
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Samuel Rogers
1763 - 1855 (92 years)
Samuel Rogers was an English poet, during his lifetime one of the most celebrated, although his fame has long since been eclipsed by his Romantic colleagues and friends Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron. His recollections of these and other friends such as Charles James Fox are key sources for information about London artistic and literary life, with which he was intimate, and which he used his wealth to support. He made his money as a banker and was also a discriminating art collector.
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Kostas Varnalis
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Kostas Varnalis was a Greek poet. Life Varnalis was born in Burgas, Eastern Rumelia , in 1884. As his name suggests, his family originated from Varna; his father's family name was Boubous. He completed his elementary studies in the Zariphios Greek high school in Plovdiv and then moved to Athens in 1902 to study literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. While there, he became involved in the Greek language dispute, taking the side of the demoticists over the supporters of the katharevousa. After his graduation in 1908 he worked for some time as a teacher in Burgas, before returning to Greece and teaching in Amaliada and Athens.
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Joanna Baillie
1762 - 1851 (89 years)
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.
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Grigol Tsereteli
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Grigol Tsereteli was a distinguished Georgian scientist, one of the founders of Papyrology, founder of the Georgian scientific school of Classical Philology, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Meritorious Scientific Worker of Georgia, Honourable Professor.
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Johan Sebastian Welhaven
1807 - 1873 (66 years)
Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven was a Norwegian author, poet, critic, and art theorist. He has been considered "one of the greatest figures in Norwegian literature." Background Johan Welhaven was born in Bergen, Norway in 1807. His grandfather, Johan Andrew Welhaven was a teacher and later assistant to the pastor at St Mary's Church , which served the city's German community. The author's father, Johan Ernst Welhaven , was a pastor at St. George's Hospital, , while his mother, Else Margaret Cammermeyer, was the daughter of Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer, resident chaplain of Holy Cross C...
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Nancy Cunard
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
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George Jean Nathan
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
George Jean Nathan was an American drama critic and magazine editor. He worked closely with H. L. Mencken, bringing the literary magazine The Smart Set to prominence as an editor, and co-founding and editing The American Mercury and The American Spectator.
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Coventry Patmore
1823 - 1896 (73 years)
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was an English poet and literary critic. He is best known for his book of poetry The Angel in the House, a narrative poem about the Victorian ideal of a happy marriage.
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Thomas Warton
1728 - 1790 (62 years)
Thomas Warton was an English literary historian, critic, and poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1785, following the death of William Whitehead. He is sometimes called Thomas Warton the younger to distinguish him from his father who had the same name. His most famous poem is The Pleasures of Melancholy, a representative work of the Graveyard Poets.
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Pietro Metastasio
1698 - 1782 (84 years)
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi , better known by his pseudonym of Pietro Metastasio , was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti. Early life Metastasio was born in Rome, where his father, Felice Trapassi, a native of Assisi, had taken service in the Corsican regiment of the papal forces. Felice married a Bolognese woman, Francesca Galasti, and became a grocer in the Via dei Cappellari. The couple had two sons and two daughters; Pietro was the younger son.
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Jean-François Marmontel
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
Jean-François Marmontel was a French historian, writer and a member of the Encyclopédistes movement. Biography He was born of poor parents at Bort, Limousin . After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, Cantal, he taught in their colleges at Clermont-Ferrand and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary success.
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Baruch Kurzweil
1907 - 1972 (65 years)
Baruch Kurzweil was a pioneer of Israeli literary criticism. Biography Kurzweil was born in Brtnice, Moravia in 1907, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He studied at Solomon Breuer's yeshiva in Frankfurt and the University of Frankfurt. Kurzweil emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1939. Kurzweil taught at a high school in Haifa, where he mentored the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch and psychologist Amos Tversky. He founded and headed Bar Ilan University's Department of Hebrew Literature until his death. He wrote a column for Haaretz newspaper.
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Vachel Lindsay
1879 - 1931 (52 years)
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was an American poet. He is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. Early years Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois where his father, Vachel Thomas Lindsay, worked as a medical doctor and had amassed considerable wealth. The Lindsays lived across the street from the Illinois Executive Mansion, home of the Governor of Illinois. The location of his childhood home influenced Lindsay, and one of his poems, "The Eagle Forgotten", eulogizes Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, whom Lindsay admi...
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Giorgio Pasquali
1885 - 1952 (67 years)
Giorgio Pasquali was an Italian classical scholar who made a fundamental contribution to the field of textual criticism. Biography Pasquali was born in Rome, the son of a barrister. He graduated in Classics from La Sapienza, defending a dissertation which bore the title "La commedia mitologica e i suoi precedenti nella letteratura greca" . In 1908 and 1909 he continued his studies in Basel and Göttingen.
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Johann Jakob Bachofen
1815 - 1887 (72 years)
Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a...
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Charles MacArthur
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright, screenwriter, and 1935 winner of the Academy Award for Best Story. Life and career MacArthur was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the sixth of seven children of stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. Early in life, MacArthur developed a passion for reading. Declining to follow his father into ministry, he moved to the Midwest and soon became a successful reporter in Chicago, working for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Daily News. MacArthur joined the United States Army for World War I, and served in France as a private assigned to Battery F, 149th Field Artillery, a unit of the 42nd Division.
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Isabel Briggs Myers
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year.
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Nikolay Dobrolyubov
1836 - 1861 (25 years)
Nikolay Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov was a Russian poet, literary critic, journalist, and prominent figure of the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a literary hero to both Karl Marx and Lenin. Biography Dobrolyubov was born in Nizhny Novgorod, where his father was a poor priest.
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Vicki Baum
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Hedwig "Vicki" Baum was an Austrian writer. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel , one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical. Education and personal life Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her mother Mathilde suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child. Her father, described as "a tyrannical, hypochondriac" man, was a bank clerk who was killed in 1942 in Novi Sad by soldiers of the Hungarian occupation. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society.
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William Saroyan
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy. Saroyan is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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Vera Brittain
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Boris Tomashevsky
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky was a Russian Formalist literary critic, theorist of poetry, textual analyst, historian of Russian literature, Pushkin scholar, translator, and writer. He was a member of the Moscow linguistic circle, the OPOJAZ and the Union of Soviet Writers.
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Witter Bynner
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Harold Witter Bynner , also known by the pen name Emanuel Morgan, was an American poet and translator. He was known for his long residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and association with other literary figures there.
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Maxwell Anderson
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
James Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, author, poet, journalist, and lyricist. Anderson faced many challenges in his career, frequently losing jobs for expressing his opinions or supporting controversial figures. Despite this, he found success as a dramatist and wrote a number of hit plays, including What Price Glory, Both Your Houses, and The Bad Seed. Many of his works were adapted for the screen, and he wrote screenplays for other authors' works as well. Anderson was married three times and had a tumultuous personal life, ultimately passing away in 1959 after suffering a stroke.
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Elmer Rice
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Elmer Rice was an American playwright. He is best known for his plays The Adding Machine and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, Street Scene . Biography Early years Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein at 127 East 90th Street in New York City. His grandfather was a political activist in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. After the failure of that political upheaval, he emigrated to the United States where he became a businessman. He spent most of his retirement years living with the Rice family and developed a close relationship with his grandson Elmer...
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John Gibson Lockhart
1794 - 1854 (60 years)
John Gibson Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
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Edna Ferber
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big , Show Boat , Cimarron , Giant and Ice Palace , which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Bishnu Dey
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Bishnu Dey was a Bengali poet, writer and academician in the era of modernism, post-modernism, who hailed from Pantihal village. Starting off as a symbologist, he won recognition for the musical quality of his poems, and forms the post-Tagore generation of Bengali poets, like Buddhadeb Basu and Samar Sen, which marked the advent of "New Poetry" in Bengali literature, deeply influenced by Marxist ideology. He published a magazine wherein he encouraged socially conscious writing. His own work reveals a poet's solitary struggle, quest for human dignity, amidst a crisis of uprooted identity. Thro...
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Esaias Tegnér
1782 - 1846 (64 years)
Esaias Tegnér was a Swedish writer, professor of the Greek language, and bishop. He was during the 19th century regarded as the father of modern poetry in Sweden, mainly through the national romantic epic Frithjof's Saga. He has been called Sweden's first modern man. Much is known about him, and he also wrote openly about himself.
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Edmond de Goncourt
1822 - 1896 (74 years)
Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt. Biography Goncourt was born in Nancy. His parents, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt and Annette-Cécile de Goncourt , were minor aristocrats who died when he and his brother Jules de Goncourt were young adults. His father was a former cavalry officer and squadron commander in the Grande Armée of Napoleon I, and his grandfather Jean-Antoine Huot de Goncourt had been a deputy in the National Assembly of 1789. Edmond attended the pension Goubaux, the Lycée Henri IV, and the Lycée Condorcet.
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Thomas Bernhard
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard's body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II." He is widely considered to be one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era.
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Sami Frashëri
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Sami bey Frashëri or Şemseddin Sâmi was an Ottoman Albanian writer, philosopher, playwright and a prominent figure of the Rilindja Kombëtare, the National Renaissance movement of Albania, together with his two brothers Abdyl and Naim. He also supported Turkish nationalism against its Ottoman counterpart, along with secularism against theocracy.
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Georges Feydeau
1862 - 1921 (59 years)
Georges-Léon-Jules-Marie Feydeau was a French playwright of the Belle Époque era, remembered for his farces, written between 1886 and 1914. Feydeau was born in Paris to middle-class parents and raised in an artistic and literary environment. From an early age he was fascinated by the theatre, and as a child he wrote plays and organised his schoolfellows into a drama group. In his teens he wrote comic monologues and moved on to writing longer plays. His first full-length comedy, , was well received, but was followed by a string of comparative failures. He gave up writing for a time in the ear...
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Austin Warren
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Austin Warren was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English. Childhood and education Edward Austin Warren Jr. was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1899, as the elder of two sons by Edward Austin Warren, city alderman of Waltham and expert butcher, and Nellie Myra Anderson Warren. He attended public grammar school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and briefly attended Waltham High School, where he received instruction in Latin and studied Esperanto independently. At the age of thirteen, Warren and his family relocated to a lonely farm in Stow, Massachusetts. He attend...
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Snorri Sturluson
1179 - 1241 (62 years)
Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was elected twice as lawspeaker of the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He is commonly thought to have authored or compiled portions of the Prose Edda, which is a major source for what is today known as Norse mythology, and Heimskringla, a history of the Norse kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga. He was assassinated in 1241 by men claiming to be ag...
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Leonid Andreyev
1871 - 1919 (48 years)
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
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Adelbert von Chamisso
1781 - 1838 (57 years)
Adelbert von Chamisso was a German poet,writer and botanist. He was commonly known in French as Adelbert de Chamisso de Boncourt, a name referring to the family estate at Boncourt. Life The son of Louis Marie, Count of Chamisso, by his marriage to Anne Marie Gargam, Chamisso began life as Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot at the château of Boncourt at Ante, in Champagne, France, the ancestral seat of his family. His name appears in several forms, one of the most common being Ludolf Karl Adelbert von Chamisso.
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Bulleh Shah
1680 - 1757 (77 years)
Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri , known popularly as Baba Bulleh Shah and Bulleya, was a 17th and 18th-century Punjabi revolutionary philosopher, reformer and a Sufi poet, universally regarded as the "Father of Punjabi Enlightenment". He spoke against powerful religious, political and social institutions. He lived and was buried in Kasur .
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Brendan Behan
1923 - 1964 (41 years)
Brendan Francis Aidan Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and Irish Republican, an activist who wrote in both English and Irish. He was named by the US website Irish Central as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time.
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Jean Giono
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Jean Giono was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France. First period Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent and his mother a laundry woman. He spent the majority of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Forced by family needs to leave school at the age of sixteen and get a job in a bank, he nevertheless continued to read voraciously, in particular the great classic works of literature including the Bible, Homer's Iliad, the works of Virgil, and the Tragiques of Agrippa d'Aubigné. He c...
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