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,
#10551
Hyatt Howe Waggoner
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Hyatt Howe Waggoner was a professor of English. He is today best known for his work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches , Hawthorne: A Critical Study and The Presence of Hawthorne , and in 1978 played a pivotal role in the authentication of the novelist's "lost notebook". In the year of Waggoner's death, he was honoured with the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award. He did not, however, confine his output to one author: "I've moved around the field", he declared, "at the risk of being superficial." Among the other literary figures who incurred his att...
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Louis Gernet
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Louis Gernet was a French philologist and sociologist. Life A student at the École Normale Supérieure , he received a licentiate in law and agrégation in grammar. In 1917, supported by the Fondation Thiers, he received his doctorate in letters with a dissertation entitled "Researches on the development of legal and moral thought in Greece".
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Otto Skutsch
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Otto Skutsch was a German-born British classicist and academic, specialising in classical philosophy. He was Professor of Latin at University College London from 1951 to 1972. Early life Skutsch was born on 6 December 1906 in Breslau, then in the German Empire. He was the third child of Franz Skutsch, a German classical philologist. He was six years old when his father died. He was educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Breslau. He then studied at the University of Breslau, the University of Kiel, the University of Berlin, and the University of Göttingen. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1934.
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Israel Edward Drabkin
1905 - 1965 (60 years)
Israel E. Drabkin was an American classicist and historian of science, medicine, and mathematics. He spent much of his career at the City College of New York. He is known for his studies of Caelius Aurelianus and Galileo.
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Gregory Tschebotarioff
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, , was a Russian-born civil engineer and prolific author. His memoir Russia, My Native Land recounted his experiences as a boy and young man in Russia, where he served in the military during World War I.
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James Runcieman Sutherland
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Sir James Runcieman Sutherland, FBA was an English literary scholar, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern Literature at London University. Life Sutherland was born on 26 April 1900 in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University before studying at Merton College, Oxford. From 1930 to 1936 he was Senior Lecturer at University College London. He married Helen Dircks in 1931. From 1936 to 1944 he was Professor of English Literature, and from 1944 to 1951 Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen Mary College. In 1951 he was appointed Lord Northcliffe P...
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J. Seelye Bixler
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Julius Seelye Bixler was the 16th President of Colby College, Maine, United States, from 1942–1960. Early life Born Julius Seelye Bixler in New London, CT, to James William Bixler and Elizabeth J. Seelye Bixler. His father was a clergyman who was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate. His maternal grandfather was Julius Hawley Seelye, president of Amherst College from 1876–90, and his grand-uncle was Laurenus Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College.
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Lawrance Thompson
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Lawrance Roger Thompson 3 April 1906 — 15 April 1973 Early life and education Thompson was born on 3 April 1906 in Franklin, New Hampshire. For his post-secondary education, Thompson received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1928 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1939.
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Wolfgang Schadewaldt
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Wolfgang Schadewaldt was a German classical philologist working mostly in the field of Greek philology and a translator. He also was a professor of University of Tübingen and University of Freiburg.
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Lewis Thorpe
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Lewis Guy Melville Thorpe FRSA FRHistS was a British philologist and translator. He was married to the Italian scholar and lexicographer Barbara Reynolds. After service in Italy in the Second World War, Lewis Thorpe joined the staff of the University of Nottingham in 1946. He was Professor of French there from 1958 to 1977. He served as President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
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Ivan Mortimer Linforth
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Ivan Mortimer Linforth was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at University of California, Berkeley. According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus , in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature. His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars. His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece.
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Theodore Spencer
1902 - 1949 (47 years)
Theodore Spencer was an American poet and academic. Life He graduated from Princeton University in 1923, and a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1928. He then taught there, from 1927 to 1949. He was appointed lecturer in English literature at Cambridge University, England, in 1939. In 1942, Spencer gave the Lowell lectures on Shakespeare, published as Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, his most important work. Spencer also published essays, short stories, and poetry.
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E. Talbot Donaldson
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was a scholar of medieval English literature, known for his 1966 translation of Beowulf and his writings on Chaucer's poetry. Biography Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was born on 18 March 1910 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Harvard University, gaining his BA in 1932. He began his career by teaching languages at the Kent School in Connecticut. He was awarded a fellowship at Yale University in 1942, rising to become the George E. Bodman Professor of English there. During the Second World War he served in the United States Air Force, rising through the ranks from private to captain.
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Frederick Rees
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Sir James Frederick Rees , known as Frederick Rees, was a Welsh historian and academic born in Milford Haven, who specialised in economic history and the history of Wales. From 1929 to 1949, he was Principal of University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. He was additionally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1935 to 1937 and also from 1944 to 1946. He had previously lectured at University College, Bangor, Queen's University Belfast, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Birmingham. He served as High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire for 1955.
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R. P. Blackmur
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet. Life Blackmur was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Cambridge High and Latin School, but was expelled in 1918. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934.
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Ernest Weekley
1865 - 1954 (89 years)
Ernest Weekley was a British philologist, best known as the author of a number of works on etymology. His An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English has been cited as a source by most authors of similar books over the 90 years since it was published. From 1898 to 1938, he was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham.
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Robert J. Getty
1908 - 1963 (55 years)
Robert John Getty was a Classicist and expert on the ancient author Lucan. Getty earned an A.B. from Queens University, Belfast, in 1928 and a master's degree from St John's College, Cambridge in 1930, where he was lecturer from 1937–1947. He became professor of Latin at the University of Toronto in 1947. In 1958 he became the first George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Ángel Rosenblat
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ángel Rosenblat was a Poland-born Venezuelan philologist, essayist and hispanist of Jewish descent. Life He and his family moved to Argentina when he was six and he spent his whole education there, including at the University of Buenos Aires, where his classmates included Amado Alonso, and in its Institute of Philology, where his teachers included Pedro Henríquez Ureña.
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Nicoletta Momigliano
1900 - Present (126 years)
Nicoletta Momigliano is an archaeologist specialising in Minoan Crete and its modern reception. Early life and education Momigliano was born in Milan, Italy, in 1960, where she attended primary and secondary school. She read Classics at the University of Pisa, where she graduated in 1982. She obtained her MA from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London , and her PhD from University College London , under the supervision of John Nicolas Coldstream. From 1990 to 1993 she was a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Research Assistant to Ann Br...
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Caroline Spurgeon
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon was an English literary critic. In 1913, she was appointed Hildred Carlisle Professor of English at the University of London and became head of the Department of English at Bedford College, London. She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain . She co-founded the International Federation of University Women with Virginia Gildersleeve.
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Gleb Struve
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Gleb Petrovich Struve was a Russian poet and literary historian. Biography Gleb Petrovich Struve was born on 1 May 1898. His father was the political theorist Peter Berngardovich Struve. Struve came from St. Petersburg and joined the Volunteer Army in 1918. Later that year he fled to Finland, then to Britain, where he studied at the University of Oxford until 1921. It was there that he met Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he remained on friendly terms and corresponded until the novelist's death.
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John Neihardt
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
John Gneisenau Neihardt was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had displaced.
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Gilbert Norwood
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Gilbert Norwood was a British classical philologist and essayist. Life Gilbert Norwood studied at St John's College of Cambridge University with John Edwin Sandys and Richard Claverhouse Jebb. After completing his Bachelor's degree , he was employed as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Manchester. He also completed his master's at Cambridge and was a Fellow at St. John's College from 1906 to 1909.
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Frank Aydelotte
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Franklin Ridgeway Aydelotte was a U.S. educator. He became the first non-Quaker president of Swarthmore College and between 1921 and 1940 redefined the institution. He was active in the Rhodes Scholar program, helped evacuate intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis during the 1930s and served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study during World War II.
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John Berryman
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Edith Morley
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Edith Julia Morley, was a literary scholar and activist. She was the main twentieth century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was a Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, now the University of Reading, from 1908 to 1940, making her the first woman to be appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution. She was a socialist and member of the Fabian society, active in various suffrage campaigns, and received an OBE for her efforts coordinating Reading's refugee programme during the Second World War.
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Julio Jiménez Rueda
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...
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Dorothea Krook-Gilead
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.
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Newton Phelps Stallknecht
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Newton Phelps Stallknecht was an American philosopher and a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Indiana University. In addition, he was the Director of the School of Letters at Indiana University from 1953-1972. He also served as a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Stallknecht was educated at Princeton University, achieving his A.B. in 1927, A.M. in 1928, and Ph.D. in 1930. During World War II, he was attached to the United States Army Security Agency in Washington. His publications cover both philosophy and comparative literature, with a philosophical fo...
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Rosemary Woolf
1925 - 1978 (53 years)
Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...
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Hans Krahe
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
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Alexander Gray
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Sir Alexander Gray was a Scottish civil servant, economist, academic, translator, writer and poet. Life and work He was born at 1 Marshall Street in Lochee near Dundee the son of John Young Gray, an art teacher at the High School of Dundee, and his wife, Mary Young.
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Robert Kaske
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America. His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf, and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies. Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, "Th...
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Gianfranco Contini
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Gianfranco Contini was an Italian academic and philologist. He studied at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola, then at the University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1933. Later, he studied also in Turin, where he met Giulio Einaudi, Massimo Mila, and Leone Ginzburg, who shortly after started the Einaudi's publishing company. From 1934 to 1936, he lived in Paris, following Joseph Bédier's lessons, then he was called to teach in Florence and Pisa, where he became a contributor to "Letteratura", a literary magazine where he shared his views, among others, with Eugenio Montale, and where he began to collaborate with the Accademia della Crusca.
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Carroll Vincent Newsom
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Carroll Vincent Newsom was an American educator who served as the eleventh NYU president and president of Prentice Hall. Newsom was born February 23, 1904, in Buckley, Illinois. He received a B.A. from the College of Emporia in 1924, a M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1927 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1931.
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Clyde Pharr
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Clyde Pharr was an American classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, Southwestern Presbyterian University , Vanderbilt University , and, finally, at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life Pharr was born in Saltillo, Texas, the son of Samuel Milton Pharr and Josephine Fleming Pharr. He attended Saltillo High School and earned B.S. and A.B. degrees from East Texas Normal College in 1903 and 1905, respectively. He continued his education at Yale University, earning another A.B. there in 1906. He was named an Abernathy Fellow at Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1910. From 1...
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Donald Alfred Stauffer
1902 - 1952 (50 years)
Donald Alfred Stauffer was an American literary critic, novelist and Professor of English who spent the majority of his career at Princeton University. Biography Stauffer studied at Princeton University, where he completed his A.B. degree in 1923 and A.M. degree in 1924. He received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. degree in 1928. After completing his doctorate he returned to Princeton, where he spent most of his career as Professor of English and English Department Chairman.
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Walter Eugene Clark
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Walter Eugene Clark , was an American philologist. He was the second Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and editor of the volumes 38-44 of the Harvard Oriental Series. He translated the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata with critical notes which was published in 1930, by the University of Chicago Press.
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Horace Gregory
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Horace Gregory was a prize-winning American poet, translator of classic poetry, literary critic and college professor. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1965. Life A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in 1923, he was the author of eight books of poems. He translated poems by the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid, and wrote biographies of Whistler and Amy Lowell. In 1925, he married poet and editor Marya Zaturenska . They had two children: Patrick Bolten Gregory and Joanna Elizabeth Zeigler née Gregory.
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Frank Card Bourne
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Frank Card Bourne was an American classicist. Life He was born on 17 July 1914. His parents were Moses Avander and Grace Winchester. He died in 1983. Career He graduated from Princeton University with his bachelor's degree in 1936 and a PhD in 1941. He was the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature there from 1946 to 1976.
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Janko Lavrin
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Janko Lavrin was a Slovene novelist, poet, critic, translator, and historian. He was Professor Andrej Jelenc DiCaprio of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. An enthusiast for psycho-analysis, he wrote what he called 'psycho-critical studies' of Ibsen, Nietzsche and Tolstoy.
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Erich Kahler
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Erich von Kahler was a mid-twentieth-century European-American literary scholar, essayist, and teacher known for works such as The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Man . Kahler was born to a Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied philosophy, literature, history, art history, sociology, and psychology at the University of Munich, the University of Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Freiburg before earning his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1911. In 1912, he married his first wife, Josephine . In...
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Cornelia C. Coulter
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
Cornelia Catlin Coulter was an American classicist and academic who was Professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.
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Thomas G. Bergin
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Thomas Goddard Bergin was an American scholar of Italian literature, who was "noted particularly for his research on Dante's Divine Comedy and for its translation". He was the Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University, and Master of Timothy Dwight College. He is the first poet to have his words launched into outer space to orbit the Earth.
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F. B. Kaye
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Frederick Benjamin Kaye was an American scholar who was notable for his work on Bernard Mandeville. Early life and education Kaye was born in New York City as Frederick Benjamin Kugelman to Julius G. Kugelman, a native of Hamburg, Germany, who had emigrated to New York. Frederick Kugelman subsequently changed his surname to Kaye. He was educated at Yale University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1914 and a Master of Arts in 1916.
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Eduard Schwyzer
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Eduard Schwyzer was a Swiss Classical philologist and Indo-European linguist, specializing in Ancient Greek and Greek dialects. He was a professor in Zürich 1912–1926, in Bonn from 1927 and in Berlin from 1932. 1898–1927 and 1934–1943 he also worked for the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, first as an editor, later reading all correction sheets.
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Gustave Lanson
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Gustave Lanson was a French historian and literary critic. He taught at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. A dominant figure in French literary criticism, he influenced several generations of writers and critics through his teachings, which were anti-systematic and promoted a scrupulous and erudite approach to texts via extensive firsthand research, inventorying, and in-depth historical investigation.
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Georg Baesecke
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Georg Paul Baesecke was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies, particularly the study of Old High German literature. He was Professor and Chair of German Philology at the University of Halle.
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Joseph Bidez
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Joseph Marie Auguste Bidez was a Belgian classical philologist. He was Professor of Classical Philology and the History of Philosophy at the University of Ghent.
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George Norlin
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
George Norlin was president of the University of Colorado. During his tenure as president, Norlin oversaw the redesign of the campus in Boulder, Colorado. Early life and education Norlin was born in Concordia, in Cloud County, Kansas, the son of Gustaf Wilhelm Norlin and Valborg Fahnehielm Norlin , both Swedish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1869. He moved to Fish Creek, Wisconsin with his family in 1879. Norlin received his Bachelor of Arts in Greek from Hastings College in 1893. He worked as a Greek instructor there before studying at the University of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D.
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