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,
#10451
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Shmuel Yosef Agnon was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon . In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.
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Louis Couperus
1863 - 1923 (60 years)
Louis Marie-Anne Couperus was a Dutch novelist and poet. His oeuvre contains a wide variety of genres: lyric poetry, psychological and historical novels, novellas, short stories, fairy tales, feuilletons and sketches. Couperus is considered to be one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature. In 1923, he was awarded the Tollensprijs .
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Idrus
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
Idrus was an Indonesian author best known for his realistic short stories and novels. He is known as the representative of the prose of the '45 generation of Indonesian literature. Biography Idrus was born in Padang, West Sumatera on 12 September 1921. His education before the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942 was entirely in Dutch-run schools, where he read works of Western literature and practiced writing short stories; he finished his education in 1943, then began working at Balai Pustaka – the state-owned publisher of the Dutch East Indies – as an editor. Between 1943 a...
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Nikos Kazantzakis
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years, and remains the most translated Greek author worldwide.
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Muriel Rukeyser
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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Daphne du Maurier
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, was an English novelist, biographer and playwright. Her parents were actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and his wife, actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, a writer and cartoonist.
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Cato the Younger
95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.
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Paul Bourget
1852 - 1935 (83 years)
Paul Charles Joseph Bourget was a French poet, novelist and critic. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Paul Bourget was born in Amiens, France. He initially abandoned Catholicism but eventually returned to it in the late 19th century. Bourget is known for his psychological and moralistic novels that often portrayed the complex emotions of women and the ideas, passions, and failures of young men in France. Some of his notable works include Le Disciple , a bestseller that explored the consequences of materialism and positivism, and other novels such as Cruelle Enigme , André Cornelis , and Mensonges .
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Iolo Morganwg
1747 - 1826 (79 years)
Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg , was a Welsh antiquarian, poet and collector. He was seen as an expert collector of Medieval Welsh literature, but it emerged after his death that he had forged several manuscripts, notably some of the Third Series of Welsh Triads. Even so, he had a lasting impact on Welsh culture, notably in founding the secret society known as the Gorsedd, through which Iolo Morganwg successfully co-opted the 18th-century Eisteddfod revival. The philosophy he spread in his forgeries has had an enormous impact upon neo-Druidism. His bardic name i...
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Primo Levi
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man , his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table , a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
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Manuel Bandeira
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho was a Brazilian poet, literary critic, and translator, who wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. Life and career Bandeira was born in Recife, Pernambuco. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather. In 1922, after an extended stay in Europe where Bandeira met many prominent authors and painters, he contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist movement in São Paulo. Bandeira began to publish his most important works in 1924.
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Brander Matthews
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
James Brander Matthews was an American academic, writer and literary critic. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study by academics. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own time.
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George Gissing
1857 - 1903 (46 years)
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best-known works have reappeared in modern editions. They include The Nether World , New Grub Street and The Odd Women .
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Josep Carner
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Josep Carner i Puigoriol , was a Spanish poet, journalist, playwright and translator. He was also known as the Prince of Catalan Poets. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
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Margaret Laurence
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Jean Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and is one of the major figures in Canadian literature. She was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.
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Paul Morand
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Paul Morand was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist and Imagist.
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Adomnán
624 - 704 (80 years)
Adomnán or Adamnán of Iona , also known as Eunan , was an abbot of Iona Abbey , hagiographer, statesman, canon jurist, and saint. He was the author of the Life of Columba , probably written between 697 and 700. This biography is by far the most important surviving work written in early-medieval Scotland, and is a vital source for our knowledge of the Picts, and an insight into the life of Iona and the early-medieval Gaelic monk.
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Namdev
1270 - 1350 (80 years)
Namdev , also transliterated as Nam Dayv, Namdeo, Namadeva, was a Marathi Vaishnav saint from Narsi, Hingoli, Maharashtra, India within the Varkari tradition of Hinduism. He lived as a devotee of Lord Vitthal of Pandharpur. He is widely regarded as the founder of Varkari tradition.
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François Fénelon
1651 - 1715 (64 years)
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon , more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. Today, he is remembered mostly as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699.
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Zachris Topelius
1818 - 1898 (80 years)
Zacharias Topelius was a Finnish author, poet, journalist, historian, and rector of the University of Helsinki who wrote novels related to Finnish history. Given name Zacharias is his baptismal name, and this is used on the covers of his printed works. However, "he himself most often used the abbreviation Z. or the form Zachris, even in official contexts", as explained in the National Biography of Finland. Zachris is therefore the preferred form used in recent academic literature about him.
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John Pentland Mahaffy
1839 - 1919 (80 years)
Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, was an Irish classicist and polymathic scholar. Education and Academic career He was born near Vevey in Switzerland on 26 February 1839 to Irish parents, Nathaniel Brindley Mahaffy and the former Elizabeth Pentland, receiving his early education privately in Switzerland and Germany, and later and more formally at Trinity College Dublin. As an undergraduate, he became President of the University Philosophical Society. He was elected a scholar in 1857, graduated in classics and philosophy in 1859, and was elected a fellow in 1864.
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George Peele
1556 - 1596 (40 years)
George Peele was an English translator, poet, and dramatist, who is most noted for his supposed but not universally accepted collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play Titus Andronicus. Many anonymous Elizabethan plays have been attributed to him, but his reputation rests mainly on Edward I, The Old Wives' Tale, The Battle of Alcazar, The Arraignment of Paris, and David and Bethsabe. The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, the immediate source for Shakespeare's King John, has been published under his name.
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Giovanni Verga
1840 - 1922 (82 years)
Giovanni Carmelo Verga di Fontanabianca was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in his native Sicily, especially the short story and later play Cavalleria rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia .
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Edgar Lee Masters
1868 - 1950 (82 years)
Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
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Erich Kästner
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Emil Erich Kästner was a German writer, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including Emil and the Detectives. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1960 for his autobiography . He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six separate years.
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François Coppée
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist. Biography Coppée was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864. In 1869, his "Poème modernes" were quite successful. In the same year, Coppée's first play, Le Passant, starring Sarah Bernhardt and Madame Agar, was received with approval at the Odéon theatre, and later Fais ce que dois and Les Bijoux de la délivrance , short poetic dramas inspired by the Franco-P...
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Cesare Pavese
1908 - 1950 (42 years)
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time. Early life and education Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started primary school in Santo Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin.
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Joost van den Vondel
1587 - 1679 (92 years)
Joost van den Vondel was a Dutch playwright, poet, literary translator and writer. He is generally regarded as the greatest writer in the Dutch language as well as an important figure in the history of Western literature. In his native country, Vondel is often called the “Prince of Poets” and the Dutch language is sometimes referred to as “the language of Vondel”. His oeuvre consists of 33 plays, a large number of poems in different genres and forms, an epic poem and many translations of predominantly classical literature. Vondel lived in the Dutch Republic during the Eighty Years' War and be...
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Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
1804 - 1869 (65 years)
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a French literary critic. Early life He was born in Boulogne, educated there, and studied medicine at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris . In 1828, he served in the St Louis Hospital. Beginning in 1824, he contributed literary articles, the Premier lundis of his collected Works, to the newspaper Globe, and in 1827 he came, by a review of Victor Hugo's Odes et Ballades, into close association with Hugo and the Cénacle, the literary circle that strove to define the ideas of the rising Romanticism and struggle against classical formalism. Sainte-Beuve became fr...
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Chester Kallman
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Chester Simon Kallman was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for collaborating with W. H. Auden on opera librettos for Igor Stravinsky and other composers. Life Kallman was born in Brooklyn of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He received his B.A. at Brooklyn College and his M.A. at the University of Michigan. He published three collections of poems, Storm at Castelfranco , Absent and Present , and The Sense of Occasion . He lived most of his adult life in New York, spending his summers in Italy from 1948 through 1957 and in Austria from 1958 through 1974.
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Leah Goldberg
1911 - 1970 (59 years)
Leah Goldberg or Lea Goldberg was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, illustrater and painter, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.
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Emma Lazarus
1849 - 1887 (38 years)
Emma Lazarus was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue. The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berl...
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Ludovic Halévy
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Ludovic Halévy was a French author and playwright, best known for his collaborations with Henri Meilhac on Georges Bizet's Carmen and on the works of Jacques Offenbach. Biography Ludovic Halévy was born in Paris. His father, Léon Halévy , was a civil servant and a clever and versatile writer, who tried almost every branch of literature—prose and verse, vaudeville, drama, history—without, however, achieving decisive success in any. His uncle, Fromental Halévy, was a noted composer of opera; hence the double and early connection of Ludovic Halévy with the Parisian stage. His father had conver...
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Nadezhda Mandelstam
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was a Russian Jewish writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia. She wrote two memoirs about their lives together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned , both first published in the West in English, translated by Max Hayward.
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Elisaveta Bagryana
1893 - 1991 (98 years)
Elisaveta Bagryana , born Elisaveta Lyubomirova Belcheva , was a Bulgarian poet who wrote her first verses while living with her family in Veliko Tarnovo in 1907–08. She, along with Dora Gabe , is considered one of the "first ladies of Bulgarian women's literature". She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
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P. Schuyler Miller
1912 - 1974 (62 years)
Peter Schuyler Miller was an American science fiction writer and critic. Life Miller was raised in New York's Mohawk Valley, which led to a lifelong interest in the Iroquois Indians. He pursued this as an amateur archaeologist and a member of the New York State Archaeological Association.
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Witold Gombrowicz
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish writer and playwright. His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937, he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: problems of immaturity and youth, creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture.
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Hall Caine
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine , usually known as Hall Caine, was a British novelist, dramatist, short story writer, poet and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Caine's popularity during his lifetime was unprecedented. He wrote fifteen novels on subjects of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, illegitimacy, infanticide, religious bigotry and women's rights, became an international literary celebrity, and sold a total of ten million books. Caine was the most highly paid novelist of his day. The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over a million copies worldwide....
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Antoni Lange
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Antoni Lange was a Polish poet, philosopher, polyglot , writer, novelist, science-writer, reporter and translator. A representative of Polish Parnassianism and symbolism, he is also regarded as belonging to the Decadent movement. He was an expert on Romanticism, French literature and a popularizer of Eastern cultures. His most popular novel is Miranda.
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Abanindranath Tagore
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Abanindranath Tagore was the principal artist and creator of the "Indian Society of Oriental Art". He was also the first major exponent of Swadeshi values in Indian art. He founded the influential Bengal school of art, which led to the development of modern Indian painting. He was also a noted writer, particularly for children. Popularly known as 'Aban Thakur', his books Rajkahini, Buro Angla, Nalak, and Khirer Putul were landmarks in Bengali language children's literature and art.
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Arthur Quiller-Couch
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a British writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900 and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer fictional character Horace Rumpole.
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Theodore Roethke
1908 - 1963 (55 years)
Theodore Huebner Roethke was an American poet. He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking, and the annual National Book Award for Poetry on two occasions: in 1959 for Words for the Wind, and posthumously in 1965 for The Far Field. His work was characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery.
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Franz Grillparzer
1791 - 1872 (81 years)
Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer was an Austrian writer who was considered to be the leading Austrian dramatist of the 19th century. His plays were and are frequently performed at the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. He also wrote the oration for Ludwig van Beethoven's funeral, as well as the epitaph for his friend Franz Schubert.
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Ramón del Valle-Inclán
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán y de la Peña was a Spanish dramatist, novelist, and member of the Spanish Generation of 98. He is considered perhaps the most noteworthy and certainly the most radical dramatist to have worked to subvert the traditionalism of the Spanish theatrical establishment in the early part of the 20th century. His influence on later generations of Spanish dramatists makes his drama even more significant. He is honored on National Theatre Day with a statue in Madrid that receives homage from the theatrical profession.
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Nikolaus Lenau
1802 - 1850 (48 years)
Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau , a German-language Austrian poet. Biography He was born at Csatád , Kingdom of Hungary, now Lenauheim, Banat, then part of the Habsburg monarchy, now in Romania. His father, a Habsburg government official, died in 1807 in Budapest, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who remarried in 1811. In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony and then spent the next four years qualifying himself in medicine. Unable to settle down to any profession, he began writing verse.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin
1884 - 1937 (53 years)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin , sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. However, Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All-Union Communist Party
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György Lukács
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
1806 - 1876 (70 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl was a German scholar best known for his studies of Plautus. Biography Ritschl was born in Großvargula, in present-day Thuringia. His family, in which culture and poverty were hereditary, were Protestants who had migrated several generations earlier from Bohemia. Ritschl was fortunate in his school training, at a time when the great reform in the higher schools of Prussia had not yet been thoroughly carried out. His chief teacher, Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, divined the boy's genius and allowed it free growth, applying only so much either of stimulus or of restraint as was absolutely needful.
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Mantarō Kubota
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Mantarō Kubota was a Japanese author, playwright, and poet. Early life Kubota was born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, to a clothing merchant family. He became interested in stage plays at an early age, largely due to the influence of his grandmother, who also provided financial support for him to attend college. While attending college preparatory courses, he attended lectures by Mori Ōgai and Nagai Kafū. While still a student at Keio University in 1911, he made his literary debut with the short novel Asagao and a stage play Yugi , both of which appeared in the university's journal Mita Bungaku, and which led to a long-lasting friendship and association with Takitarō Minakami.
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Heinrich Hübschmann
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Johann Heinrich Hübschmann was a German philologist. Life Hübschmann was born on 1 July 1848 at Erfurt. He studied Oriental philology at Jena, Tübingen, Leipzig, and Munich; in 1876 he became professor of Iranian languages at Leipzig, and in 1877 professor of comparative philology at Strasbourg. Hübschmann died on 20 January 1908 in Freiburg im Breisgau.
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