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,
#10551
Thomas Dekker
1572 - 1632 (60 years)
Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.
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Sándor Kőrösi Csoma
1784 - 1842 (58 years)
Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was a Hungarian philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning "the foreign pupil", and was declared a bosatsu or bodhisattva by the Japanese in 1933. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His birth date is often given as 4 April, although this is actually his baptism day and the year of his birth is debated by some authors who put it at 1787 or 1788 rather than 1784. The Magyar ethnic group, the Székelys, to which he belonged believed that they were derived from a branch of Attila's Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century.
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Zhu Ziqing
1898 - 1948 (50 years)
Zhu Ziqing , born Zhu Zihua, was a renowned Chinese poet and essayist. Zhu studied at Peking University, and during the May Fourth Movement became one of several pioneers of modernism in China during the 1920s. Zhu was a prolific writer of both prose and poetry, but is best known for essays like "Retreating Figure" , and "You. Me." . His best known work in verse is the long poem "Destruction" or Huimie .
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Sara Teasdale
1884 - 1933 (49 years)
Sara Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914. In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.
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John William Mackail
1859 - 1945 (86 years)
John William Mackail was a Scottish academic of Oxford University and reformer of the British education system. He is most often remembered as a scholar of Virgil and as the official biographer of the socialist artist William Morris, of whom he was a friend.
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Margaret Wise Brown
1910 - 1952 (42 years)
Margaret Wise Brown was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.
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Epicharmus of Kos
524 BC - 435 BC (89 years)
Epicharmus of Kos or Epicharmus Comicus or Epicharmus Comicus Syracusanus , thought to have lived between c. 550 and c. 460 BC, was a Greek dramatist and philosopher who is often credited with being one of the first comic writers, having originated the Doric or Sicilian comedic form.
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Numa Pompilio Llona
1832 - 1907 (75 years)
Numa Pompilio Llona Echeverri was an Ecuadorian poet, journalist, educator, diplomat, and philosopher. Numa Pompilio Llona was widely read in his time, but today he is mostly forgotten. Biography His father was the Ecuadorian lawyer Dr. Manuel Leocadio de Llona y Rivera, and his mother was Mercedes Echeverri Llados from Colombia. Born in Guayaquil, Numa Pompilio Llona completed primary school in Cali, Colombia, and completed secondary school in Lima, Peru. He received a law degree at the Universidad San Marcoss in Lima, Peru.
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Gaston Leroux
1868 - 1927 (59 years)
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical. His 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.
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James Jones
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
James Ramon Jones was an American novelist known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath. He won the 1952 National Book Award for his first published novel, From Here to Eternity, which was adapted for the big screen immediately and made into a television series a generation later.
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Volodymyr Sosiura
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Volodymyr Mikolayovich Sosiura was a Ukrainian lyric poet, writer, veteran of the Russian Civil War . Brief biography Volodymyr Sosiura was born in a settlement of Debaltseve train station . He started to work in 1909 at the Donets Soda Factory in a settlement Verkhnee where he worked for couple of years. In 1914–1918 he studied in an agricultural school in a settlement of Yama train station . In 1918 Sosiura was a member of the Donets Soda Factory insurgent workers group.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Anne Bradstreet
1612 - 1672 (60 years)
Anne Bradstreet was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.
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Sigurður Nordal
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Sigurður Nordal was an Icelandic scholar, writer, and ambassador. He was influential in forming the theory of the Icelandic sagas as works of literature composed by individual authors. Education Nordal studied Scandinavian Philology in Copenhagen where he received his MA in 1912. In 1914 he completed his doctoral thesis. He then went on to study philosophy in Berlin and Oxford.
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Henry Reynolds
1564 - 1632 (68 years)
Henry Reynolds was an English schoolmaster poet and literary critic of the seventeenth century. Born in Suffolk, he is known for two works: Aminta Englisht of 1628, a translation from Tasso, and Mythomystes, a 1632 critical work on poetry considered to be most influenced by the Neoplatonism of the early Italian Renaissance. He was the dedicatee of a 1627 poem by Michael Drayton.
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Francis Darwin
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Sir Francis Darwin was a British botanist. He was the third son of the naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin. Biography Francis Darwin was born in Down House, Downe, Kent in 1848. He was the third son and seventh child of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood. He was educated at Clapham Grammar School.
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Wilhelm Viëtor
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Carl Adolf Theodor Wilhelm Viëtor was a German phonetician and language educator. He was a central figure in the Reform Movement in language education of the late 19th century, which sought to replace the traditional grammar–translation method with oral language teaching.
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Henry Olsson
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Karl Henry Olsson was a Swedish literary scholar. He was Professor of literary history and poetics at Stockholm University and a member of the Swedish Academy. Early life Olsson was born in Köla parish, present-day Eda Municipality in the westernmost part of Värmland. After finishing his schooling in Karlstad he became a student at Uppsala university in 1914, and studied literature, especially poetry, for Henrik Schück, Martin Lamm, and Anton Blanck. He received a BA degree in 1918, a licentiate in 1921 and an MA in 1924.
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Georges Bernanos
1888 - 1948 (60 years)
Louis Émile Clément Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. A Catholic with monarchist leanings, he was critical of elitist thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism. He believed this had led to France's defeat and eventual occupation by Germany in 1940 during World War II. His two major novels Sous le soleil de Satan and the Journal d'un curé de campagne both revolve around a parish priest who combats evil and despair in the world. Most of his novels have been translated into English and frequently published in both Great Britain and the United ...
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Edwin Arnold
1832 - 1904 (72 years)
Sir Edwin Arnold KCIE CSI was an English poet and journalist, who is most known for his work The Light of Asia. Biography Arnold was born at Gravesend, Kent, the second son of a Sussex magistrate, Robert Coles Arnold. He grew up at Southchurch Wick, a farm in Southchurch, Essex, and was educated at King's School, Rochester; King's College London; and University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize for poetry on the subject of "The Feast of Belshazzar" in 1852. He became a schoolmaster, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and in 1856 went to India as Principal of the Deccan Coll...
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August Ahlqvist
1826 - 1889 (63 years)
Karl August Engelbrekt Ahlqvist, who wrote as A. Oksanen , was a Finnish professor, poet, scholar of the Finno-Ugric languages, author, and literary critic. He is best remembered as the sharpest critic of writer Aleksis Kivi, who later rose to the position of the national author of Finland.
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Martial
40 - 104 (64 years)
Marcus Valerius Martialis was a Roman poet born in Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these poems he satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.
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Dai Wangshu
1905 - 1950 (45 years)
Dai Wangshu , also Tai Van-chou, was a Chinese poet, essayist and translator active from the late 1920s to the end of the 1940s. A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, he graduated from the Aurora University, Shanghai in 1926, majoring in French.
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Fredrika Bremer
1801 - 1865 (64 years)
Fredrika Bremer was a Finnish-born Swedish writer and reformer. Her Sketches of Everyday Life were wildly popular in Britain and the United States during the 1840s and 1850s and she is regarded as the Swedish Jane Austen, bringing the realist novel to prominence in Swedish literature. In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV for emancipation from her brother's wardship; in her 50s, her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all unmarried Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden's first female tertiary school.
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Manuel Rojas
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Manuel Rojas Sepúlveda was a Chilean writer and journalist. Biography Rojas was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Chilean parents. In 1899 his family returned to Santiago, but in 1903, after his father's death, his mother returned to Buenos Aires, where he attended school until the age of eleven. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, he decided to return alone to Chile. Once he arrived, he got involved with intellectuals and anarchist groups, while working various jobs as an unskilled labourer. He worked as a house painter, electrician, agricultural worker, railroad handyman, loading ships, tailor's apprentice, cobbler, ship guard, and actor in small-time itinerant groups.
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Carl David af Wirsén
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Carl David af Wirsén was a Swedish poet, literary critic and the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary 1884–1912. Career Wirsén was born in Vallentuna, Uppland, to Karl Ture af Wirsén and Eleonore von Schulzenheim.
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Mary Gilmore
1865 - 1962 (97 years)
Dame Mary Jean Gilmore was an Australian writer and journalist known for her prolific contributions to Australian literature and the broader national discourse. She wrote both prose and poetry. Gilmore was born in rural New South Wales, and spent her childhood in and around the Riverina, living both in small bush settlements and in larger country towns like Wagga Wagga. Gilmore qualified as a schoolteacher at the age of 16, and after a period in the country was posted to Sydney. She involved herself with the burgeoning labour movement, and she also became a devotee of the utopian socialism views of William Lane.
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Theodor Körner
1791 - 1813 (22 years)
Carl Theodor Körner was a German poet and soldier. After having lived for some time in Vienna, where he wrote some light comedies and other works for the Burgtheater, he became a soldier and joined the Lützow Free Corps in the German uprising against Napoleon. During this time, he displayed personal courage in many fights, and inspired his comrades by fiery patriotic lyrics he composed. One of these was the "Schwertlied" , composed during a lull in fighting, only a few hours before his death, and Lützow's wilde Jagd, each set to music by both Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert. He was of...
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Leopoldo Alas
1852 - 1901 (49 years)
Leopoldo Enrique García-Alas y Ureña , also known as Clarín, was a Spanish realist novelist born in Zamora. His inflammatory articles, known as paliques , as well as his advocacy of liberalism and anti-clericalism, made him a formidable and controversial critical voice. He died in Oviedo.
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Abraham Cowley
1618 - 1667 (49 years)
Abraham Cowley was an English poet and essayist born in the City of London late in 1618. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14 printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721.
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Marcus Clarke
1846 - 1881 (35 years)
Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke was an English-born Australian novelist, journalist, poet, editor, librarian, and playwright. He is best known for his 1874 novel For the Term of His Natural Life, about the convict system in Australia, and widely regarded as a classic of Australian literature. It has been adapted into many plays, films and a folk opera.
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Sei Itō
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
, born , was a Japanese Modernist writer of poetry, prose and essays, and a translator. Life Sei Itō was born in Matsumae, Hokkaidō, under the name of Hitoshi Itō. After graduating from Otaru Higher Commercial School , he moved to Tokyo and entered the Tokyo College of Commerce , which he left without a graduate. In 1926, he debuted with the poetry collection Yukiakari no michi . Together with writers like Junzaburō Nishiwaki, Riichi Yokomitsu and Tomoji Abe, Itō became an exponent of writers who introduced European Modernist literature into Japan in the literary journal Shi to shiron , and ke...
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Choe Chiwon
857 - 901 (44 years)
Choe Chiwon was a Korean philosopher and poet of the late medieval Unified Silla period . He studied for many years in Tang China, passed the Tang imperial examination, and rose to the high office there before returning to Silla, where he made ultimately futile attempts to reform the governmental apparatus of a declining Silla state.
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Pramatha Chaudhuri
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Pramathanath Chaudhuri , known as Pramatha Chaudhuri, alias Birbal, was a Bengali writer and a figure in Bengali literature. He was the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore as his mother was Sukumari Debi, the second sister of Tagore. He married musician and writer Indira Devi Chaudhurani, daughter of Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to have joined the Indian Civil Services and an author, composer and feminist, who was the second eldest brother of Rabindranath Tagore.
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Francis Day
1829 - 1889 (60 years)
Francis Talbot Day was an army surgeon and naturalist in the Madras Presidency who later became the Inspector-General of Fisheries in India and Burma. A pioneer ichthyologist, he described more than three hundred fishes in the two-volume work on The Fishes of India. He also wrote the fish volumes of the Fauna of British India series. He was also responsible for the introduction of trout into the Nilgiri hills, for which he received a medal from the French Societe d'Acclimatation. Many of his fish specimens are distributed across museums with only a small fraction deposited in the British Mus...
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Dodie Smith
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith was an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians . Other works include Dear Octopus and The Starlight Barking . The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 animated film and a 1996 live-action film, both produced by Disney. Her novel I Capture the Castle was adapted into a 2003 film. I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of the BBC's The Big Read .
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Henry Newbolt
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Sir Henry John Newbolt, CH was an English poet, novelist and historian. He also had a role as a government adviser with regard to the study of English in England. He is perhaps best remembered for his poems "Vitaï Lampada" and "Drake's Drum".
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Elisabeth of Wied
1843 - 1916 (73 years)
Elisabeth of Wied was the first queen of Romania as the wife of King Carol I from 15 March 1881 to 27 September 1914. She had been the princess consort of Romania since her marriage to then-Prince Carol on 15 November 1869.
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John Ford
1586 - 1639 (53 years)
John Ford was an English playwright and poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras born in Ilsington in Devon, England. His plays deal mainly with the conflict between passion and conscience. Although remembered primarily as a playwright, he also wrote a number of poems on themes of love and morality.
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Mihail Dragomirescu
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Mihail Dragomirescu was a Romanian aesthetician, literary theorist and critic. Born in Plătărești, Călărași County, he completed primary school in his native village in 1881, followed by Bucharest's Gheorghe Lazăr Gymnasium and Saint Sava High School from 1881 to 1889. He then obtained a degree from the University of Bucharest's literature and philosophy faculty; his 1892 thesis dealt with Herbert Spencer. His published debut came that year, with a prose poem in the Junimea-affiliated Convorbiri Literare. A student of Junimea founder Titu Maiorescu's, he took part in the 1890 establishment of the Cultural League for the Unity of All Romanians.
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Arthur Bernard Cook
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Arthur Bernard Cook FBA was a British archeologist and classical scholar, best known for his three-part work, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Early life and education Arthur Bernard Cook was born in Hampstead, London on 22 October 1868. He was the son of William Henry Cook MD and Harriet Bickersteth His mother's family were leading ecclesiastical scholars of the time, including Edward Bickersteth , Edward Bickersteth and Edward Bickersteth .
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Friedrich Neumann
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
Friedrich Neumann was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Friedrich Neumann was born Kassel, Germany on 2 March 1889. From 1907 to 1913, Neumann studied classical philology, German literature and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Munich and Göttingen. He received his Ph.D. at Göttingen in 1914.
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Vitorino Nemésio
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Vitorino Nemésio Mendes Pinheiro da Silva was a Portuguese poet, author and intellectual from Terceira, Azores, best known for his novel Mau Tempo No Canal, as well as being a professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon and member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon.
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Paul Wendland
1864 - 1915 (51 years)
Paul Wendland was a German classical philologist. Born in Hohenstein, Province of Prussia, he taught as a professor at the Kiel University , Breslau University , Göttingen University . He was co-author of an edition on Philo of Alexandria, "Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt" . With Otto Kern, he published "Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie und Religion" .
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Xu Shoushang
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Xu Shoushang was a Chinese writer. He was one of the co-authors of the Twelve Symbols national emblem in 1912.
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Edward James
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Edward Frank Willis James was a British poet known for his patronage of the surrealist art movement. Early life and marriage James was born on 16 August 1907, the only son of William James and Evelyn Forbes, a Scots socialite. He was reputedly fathered by the Prince of Wales and in his anecdotal reminiscences, recorded in Swans Reflecting Elephants – My Early Years, Edward James also puts forward this hypothesis. In his memoirs he wrote "I was not, I was, in fact, his grandson" saying that it was his grandmother that had an affair with the Prince of Wales. However, there was also popular be...
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Einar Høigård
1907 - 1943 (36 years)
Einar Musæus Høigård was a Norwegian educator and civil resistance member. Biography Høigård was born in Stavanger, the son of Jonas Bernhard Høigård and Caroline Hansine Musæus. Among his works is a dissertation on Henrik Anker Bjerregaard from 1934 and a monograph on the history of Oslo Cathedral School from 1942. During the German occupation of Norway he played a central role in the teachers' resistance against Nazification of schools and youth organizations. He was arrested in 1943 during an escape attempt to Sweden, tortured by the Gestapo and committed suicide during interrogation.
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Brian Higgins
1930 - 1965 (35 years)
Brian Higgins was an Irish poet, mathematician and professional rugby league footballer. ‘Born at Batley in 1930, bored at Bradford in 1940, in 1950 he had an affair with the gamma function. He was educated in 1960 at the "York Minster", Soho.’ Thus states the biographical note on the endpaper of Brian Higgins's first book of poems, "The Only Need". Brian Higgins died in 1965, before his third book of poems "The Northern Fiddler" appeared. In an introduction to this book the poet George Barker wrote that Higgins "had perceived that the secret at the heart of affairs constituted the most in...
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John Hennig
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
John Hennig was a German theologian, businessman and scholar of Irish and German Literature. Origins Hennig was born in Leipzig on 3 March 1911, the son of a teacher, Max Hennig, and his wife Johanna Clemen. Like his brother Karl , later to be a theologian and pastor, Hans, as he was known, frequented the Thomasschule in Leipzig. The family was Lutheran. Hennig's mother was a deaconess at her marriage and his father had a doctorate in the psychology of religious perception and was an ordained minister, though he had chosen to become a high-school religion teacher rather than a pastor. A brot...
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Einar Löfstedt
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Haimon Einar Harald Löfstedt was a Swedish Latinist and classical philologist. His father, also named Einar Löfstedt, was a scholar of Greek. He was Professor of Roman Oratory and Poetry at Lund University from 1913. Löfstedt was a member of the Swedish Academy, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
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