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,
#10501
Ivan Bunin
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
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Denis Diderot
1713 - 1784 (71 years)
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
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Menander
340 BC - 292 BC (48 years)
Menander was a Greek dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy. He wrote 108 comedies and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times. His record at the City Dionysia is unknown.
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Lucan
39 - 65 (26 years)
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus , better known in English as Lucan , was a Roman poet, born in Corduba , in Hispania Baetica. He is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period, known in particular for his epic Pharsalia. His youth and speed of composition set him apart from other poets.
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Roald Dahl
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Roald Dahl was a British author of popular children's literature and short stories, a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace. His books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. Dahl has been called "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century".
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Konstantin Balmont
1867 - 1942 (75 years)
Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a Russian symbolist poet and translator who became one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. Balmont's early education came from his mother, who knew several foreign languages, was enthusiastic about literature and theater, and exerted a strong influence on her son. He then attended two gymnasiumss, was expelled from the first for political activities, and graduated from the second. He started studying law at the Imperial Moscow University in 1886, but was quickly expelled for taking part in student unrest. He tried again at the Demi...
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Georges Simenon
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was a Belgian writer, most famous for his fictional detective Jules Maigret. One of the most popular authors of the 20th century, he published around 400 novels, 21 volumes of memoirs and many short stories, selling over 500 million copies.
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Károly Kerényi
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Károly Kerényi , also known as Karl Kerényi and Karl Kerenyi, was a Hungarian scholar in classical philology and one of the founders of modern studies of Greek mythology. Life Hungary, 1897–1943 Kerényi was born in Temesvár, Austria-Hungary to Hungarian parents of partly German origin. His father’s family was of Swabian peasant descent. His mother was Karolina Halász. Kerényi learnt German as a foreign language at school, and later chose it as his language for scientific work. He identified himself with the city of Arad, where he attended secondary school, because of its liberal spirits as the city of the 13 martyrs of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49.
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Yasunari Kawabata
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
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William Hazlitt
1778 - 1830 (52 years)
William Hazlitt was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print.
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Sinclair Lewis
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street , Babbitt , Arrowsmith , Elmer Gantry , Dodsworth , and It Can't Happen Here .
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Alexander Blok
1880 - 1921 (41 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. Early life Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into an intellectual family of Alexander Lvovich Blok and Alexandra Andreevna Beketova. His father was a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather, Andrey Beketov, was a famous botanist and the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.
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Evelyn Waugh
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust , the novel Brideshead Revisited , and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour . He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
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Georg Büchner
1813 - 1837 (24 years)
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose, considered part of the Young Germany movement. He was also a revolutionary and the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. His literary achievements, though few in number, are generally held in great esteem in Germany and it is widely believed that, had it not been for his early death, he might have joined such central German literary figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller at the summit of their profession.
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Pierre Corneille
1606 - 1684 (78 years)
Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play, Le Cid, about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed Académie française for breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
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W. S. Gilbert
1836 - 1911 (75 years)
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
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Jayadeva
1170 - 1245 (75 years)
Jayadeva , also spelt Jaideva, was a Sanskrit poet during the 12th century. He is most known for his epic poem Gita Govinda which concentrates on Krishna's love with the gopi, Radha, in a rite of spring. This poem, which presents the view that Radha is greater than Krishna, is considered an important text in the Bhakti movement of Hinduism.
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Raymond Queneau
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo , notable for his wit and cynical humour. Biography Queneau was born at 47, rue Thiers , Le Havre, Seine-Inférieure, the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. After studying in Le Havre, Queneau moved to Paris in 1920 and received his first baccalauréat in 1925 for philosophy from the University of Paris. Queneau performed military service as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–26. During the 1920s and 1930s Queneau took odd jobs for income such as bank teller, tu...
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Sylvia Plath
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel , and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
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Juan Ramón Jiménez
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity". One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the concept of "pure poetry".
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Laurence Sterne
1713 - 1768 (55 years)
Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, published sermons and memoirs, and indulged in local politics. He grew up in a military family, travelling mainly in Ireland but briefly in England. An uncle paid for Sterne to attend Hipperholme Grammar School in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as Sterne's father was ordered to Jamaica, where he died of malaria some years later. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge on a sizarship, gaining bachelor's and master's degrees.
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Prosper Mérimée
1803 - 1870 (67 years)
Prosper Mérimée was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, before translating the work of several notable Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, responsible...
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Stesichorus
630 BC - 555 BC (75 years)
Stesichorus was a Greek lyric poet native of today's Calabria . He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres, and for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing verses first insulting and then flattering to Helen of Troy.
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Murasaki Shikibu
973 - 1014 (41 years)
was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be one of the world's first novels, written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012. Murasaki Shikibu is a descriptive name; her personal name is unknown, but she may have been , who was mentioned in a 1007 court diary as an imperial lady-in-waiting.
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Bram Stoker
1847 - 1912 (65 years)
Abraham Stoker was an Irish author who wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the West End's Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.
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J. M. Barrie
1860 - 1937 (77 years)
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens , then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a 1904 West End "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.
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Ludovico Ariosto
1474 - 1533 (59 years)
Ludovico Ariosto was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso . The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions into many sideplots. The poem is transformed into a satire of the chivalric tradition. Ariosto composed the poem in the ottava rima rhyme scheme and introduced narrative commentary throughout the work.
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Clark Ashton Smith
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "fill...
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Anaïs Nin
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris , and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.
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Mikhail Lermontov
1814 - 1841 (27 years)
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837 and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose, which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.
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Francisco de Quevedo
1584 - 1645 (61 years)
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, Knight of the Order of Santiago was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, Quevedo was one of the most prominent Spanish poets of the age. His style is characterized by what was called conceptismo. This style existed in stark contrast to Góngora's culteranismo.
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Conrad Aiken
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Conrad Potter Aiken was an American writer and poet, honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, a play, and an autobiography.
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John Dos Passos
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist, most notable for his U.S.A. trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visiting Europe and southwest Asia, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Paris and Italy, before joining the United States Army Medical Corps as a private.
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Tulsidas
1532 - 1623 (91 years)
Rambola Dubey popularly known by his title Tulsidas or Goswami Tulsidas, was a Vaishnava Hindu saint and poet, renowned for his devotion to the deity Rama. He wrote several popular works in Sanskrit, Awadhi, and Braj, but is best known as the author of the Hanuman Chalisa and of the epic Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana based on Rama's life in the vernacular Awadhi.
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Francis Picabia
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921. He was later briefly assoc...
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Katherine Mansfield
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a New Zealand writer and critic who is considered to be an important author of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages.
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William Makepeace Thackeray
1811 - 1863 (52 years)
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist and illustrator. He is known for his satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of British society, and the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which was adapted for a 1975 film by Stanley Kubrick.
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John Greenleaf Whittier
1807 - 1892 (85 years)
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.
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Edmund Gosse
1849 - 1928 (79 years)
Sir Edmund William Gosse was an English poet, author and critic. He was strictly brought up in a small Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, but broke away sharply from that faith. His account of his childhood in the book Father and Son has been described as the first psychological biography.
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Vasily Zhukovsky
1783 - 1852 (69 years)
Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. He held a high position at the Romanov court as tutor to the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and later to her son, the future Tsar-Liberator Alexander II.
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Christopher Isherwood
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin , a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret ; A Single Man , adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind , a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
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Jean de La Fontaine
1621 - 1695 (74 years)
Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.
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August Derleth
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House . Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
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Kabir
1398 - 1518 (120 years)
Kabir was a well-known Indian mystic poet and saint. His writings influenced Hinduism's Bhakti movement, and his verses are found in Sikhism's scripture Guru Granth Sahib, the Satguru Granth Sahib of Saint Garib Das, and Kabir Sagar of Dharamdas. Today, his poems are not only sung by Hindus and Sikhs, but also by Muslims—especially Sufis.
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John Tzetzes
1110 - 1180 (70 years)
John Tzetzes was a Byzantine poet and grammarian who lived at Constantinople in the 12th century. He is known for making significant contributions in preserving much valuable information from ancient Greek literature and scholarship. Of his numerous works, the most important one is the Book of Histories, also known as Chiliades . The work is a long poem containing knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere and serves as commentary on Tzetzes' own letters. Two of his other important works are the Allegoriai on the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are long didactic poems containing interpretations of ...
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John Betjeman
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Sir John Betjeman was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
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Paul Éluard
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Éluard , born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, a matronymic borrowed from his maternal grandmother. He adhered to Dadaism and became one of the pillars of Surrealism by opening the way to artistic action politically committed to the Communist Party.
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Shota Rustaveli
1172 - 1216 (44 years)
Shota Rustaveli , mononymously known simply as Rustaveli, was a medieval Georgian poet. He is considered to be the pre-eminent poet of the Georgian Golden Age and one of the greatest contributors to Georgian literature. Rustaveli was the author of The Knight in the Panther's Skin, a Georgian national epic poem.
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Hermann Hesse
1877 - 1962 (85 years)
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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William Godwin
1756 - 1836 (80 years)
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in t...
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