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
Curzio Malaparte
1898 - 1957 (59 years)
Curzio Malaparte , born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian writer, filmmaker, war correspondent and diplomat. Malaparte is best known outside Italy due to his works Kaputt and The Skin . The former is a semi-fictionalised account of the Eastern Front during the Second World War and the latter is an account focusing on morality in the immediate post-war period of Naples .
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Wu Mi
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Wu Mi Education In 1903, Wu Mi went to an old-style private school, where his classmates ranged from ten to thirty years old, to begin studying Sinology systematically in Xi'an. He read Confucian classics such as Spring and Autumn Annals, Zuo Zhuan. He also read Xinmin Series Newspaper Shanghai Vernacular Newspaper , the papers sent by his family from Shanghai. He also tried writing novels, but did not succeed.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage
1826 - 1898 (72 years)
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism , and freethought . She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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Dmytro Chyzhevsky
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Dmytro Ivanovych Chyzhevsky was a Ukrainian-born scholar of Slavic literature, history, culture and philosophy. Biography Early life Dmytro Chyzhevsky was born of Russian-Polish-Ukrainian ancestry on 3 March 1894, at Oleksandriia, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, near the Black Sea. His first interest was philosophy, and his teachers were Nikolay Lossky, Vasyl Zenkivskyi, and Georgy Chelpanov. From 1911 to 1913 he studied philosophy and literature at the University of St. Petersburg and afterwards at the department of history and philology at St. Volodymyr University of Kyi...
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Emily Hale
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read. The day the Hale letter...
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Owen Wister
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Biography Early life Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown, a neighborhood in the northwestern part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician raised at Grumblethorpe in Germantown. He was a distant cousin of Sally Wister through his descent from John Wister , brother of Caspar Wistar. His mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of Fanny Kemble, a British actress, and Pierce Mease Butler.
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Rudolf Kassner
1873 - 1959 (86 years)
Rudolf Kassner was an Austrian writer, essayist, translator and cultural philosopher. Although stricken as an infant with poliomyelitis, Kassner traveled widely to northern Africa, the Sahara, India, Russia, Spain, and throughout Europe. His translations of William Blake introduced this English romantic poet to German-speaking audiences. His literary career covered six decades, including a period of isolation during the Nazi years in Vienna. His writings on physiognomy reflect his effort to understand the problems of modernity and Man's subsequent disconnectedness from time and place. His lat...
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Emilio Salgari
1862 - 1911 (49 years)
Emilio Salgari was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction. In Italy, his extensive body of work was more widely read than that of Dante Alighieri. Today he is still among the 40 most translated Italian authors. Many of his most popular novels have been adapted as comics, animated series and feature films. He is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the "grandfather" of the Spaghetti Western.
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Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy , often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy, was a Russian poet, novelist, and playwright. He is considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist, primarily on account of the strength of his dramatic trilogy The Death of Ivan the Terrible , Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich , and Tsar Boris . He also gained fame for his satirical works, published under his own name and under the collaborational pen name of Kozma Prutkov. His fictional works include the novella The Family of the Vourdalak, The Vampire , and the historical novel Prince Sere...
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Victoria Woodhull
1838 - 1927 (89 years)
Victoria Claflin Woodhull , later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35.
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Eugène Sue
1804 - 1857 (53 years)
Marie-Joseph "Eugène" Sue was a French novelist. He was one of several authors who popularized the genre of the serial novel in France with his very popular and widely imitated The Mysteries of Paris, which was published in a newspaper from 1842 to 1843.
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Chester Himes
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works, some of which have been filmed, include If He Hollers Let Him Go, published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series of novels for which he is best known, set in the 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In 1958 Himes won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
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George Borrow
1803 - 1881 (78 years)
George Henry Borrow was an English writer of novels and of travel based on personal experiences in Europe. His travels gave him a close affinity with the Romani people of Europe, who figure strongly in his work. His best-known books are The Bible in Spain and the novels Lavengro and The Romany Rye, set in his time with the English Romanichal .
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Ruth Manning-Sanders
1886 - 1988 (102 years)
Ruth Manning-Sanders was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide. She published over 90 books in her lifetime
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Charles Warren Stoddard
1843 - 1909 (66 years)
Charles Warren Stoddard was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life. Biography Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York on August 7, 1843. He was descended in a direct line from Anthony Stoddard of England, who settled at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1639.
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Peter Mark Roget
1779 - 1869 (90 years)
Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words. He also read a paper to the Royal Society about a peculiar optical illusion in 1824, which is often regarded as the origin of the persistence of vision theory that was later commonly used to explain apparent motion in film and animation.
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Comte de Lautréamont
1846 - 1870 (24 years)
Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse , a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.
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Innokenty Annensky
1855 - 1909 (54 years)
Innokenty Fyodorovich Annensky Biography Annensky was born into the family of a public official in Omsk on 1 September [O.S. 20 August] 1855. In 1860, while still a child, he was taken to Saint Petersburg. Annensky lost his parents early on, and was raised in the family of his older brother, Nikolai Annensky, a prominent Narodnik and political activist.
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Anandavardhana
820 - 890 (70 years)
Ānandavardhana was the author of Dhvanyāloka, or A Light on Suggestion , a work articulating the philosophy of "aesthetic suggestion" . The philosopher Abhinavagupta wrote an important commentary on it, the Locana, or The Eye.
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Camil Petrescu
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Camil Petrescu was a Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet. He marked the end of the traditional novel era and laid the foundation of the modern novel era in Romania. Life Petrescu was born in Bucharest in 1894. He lost both his parents early in life and was raised by a relative, or a nanny from the Moșilor suburb .
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Donald Davidson
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
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Roy Campbell
1901 - 1957 (56 years)
Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell , was a South African poet, literary critic, literary translator, war poet, and satirist. Born into a White South African family of Scottish descent in Durban, Colony of Natal, Campbell was sent to England to attend Oxford University. Instead, Campbell failed the entrance exam and drifted into London's literary bohemia. Following his marriage to bohemian English noblewoman Mary Garman, Campbell wrote the well-received poem The Flaming Terrapin which brought the Campbells into the highest circles of British literature.
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Henry Liddell
1811 - 1898 (87 years)
Henry George Liddell was dean of Christ Church, Oxford, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University , headmaster of Westminster School , author of A History of Rome , and co-author of the monumental work A Greek–English Lexicon, known as "Liddell and Scott", which is still widely used by students of Greek. Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for Henry Liddell's daughter Alice.
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Werner Jaeger
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Werner Wilhelm Jaeger was a German-American classicist. Life Werner Wilhelm Jaeger was born in Lobberich, Rhenish Prussia in the German Empire. He attended school in Lobberich and at the Gymnasium Thomaeum in Kempen. Jaeger studied at the University of Marburg and University of Berlin. He received a Ph.D. from the latter in 1911 for a dissertation on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. His habilitation was on Nemesios of Emesa in 1914. At only 26 years old, Jaeger was called to the professorial chair in Greek at the University of Basel in Switzerland once held by Friedrich Nietzsche. One year later...
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Mary Russell Mitford
1787 - 1855 (68 years)
Mary Russell Mitford was an English author and dramatist. She was born at Alresford in Hampshire. She is best known for Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire.
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F. O. Matthiessen
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
Francis Otto Matthiessen was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars. It also established American Renaissance as the common term to refer to American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. Matthiessen was known for his support of liberal causes and progressive politics. His contributions to the Harvar...
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Robert Fergusson
1750 - 1774 (24 years)
Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment. Many of his extant poems were printed from 1771 onwards in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, and a collected works was first published early in 1773. Despite a short life, his career was highly influential, especially through its impact on Robert Burns. He wrote both Scottish English and the Scots language, and it is his vivid and masterly ...
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Caroline Gordon
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was an American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and an O. Henry Award in 1934. Biography Gordon was born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky at her family's plantation home, "Woodstock". She was educated at her father's Clarksville Classical School for Boys in Montgomery County, Tennessee. In 1916, Gordon graduated from Bethany College and became a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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Émile Zola
1840 - 1902 (62 years)
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
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Abe Burrows
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Abe Burrows was an American humorist, author, and director for radio and the stage. He won a Tony Award and was selected for two Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was awarded. Early years Born Abram Solman Borowitz in New York City, Burrows graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and later attended both City College and New York University. He began working as a runner on Wall Street while at NYU, and he also worked in an accounting firm. After he met Frank Galen in 1938, the two wrote and sold jokes to an impressionist who appeared on Rudy Vallée's radio program.
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Klaus Groth
1819 - 1899 (80 years)
Klaus Groth was a Low German poet. Biography Groth was born in Heide, in Ditmarschen, the western part of the Duchy of Holstein. He was the oldest son of Hartwig Groth, a miller, and his wife Anna Christina. He spent an idyllic childhood in Heide, which served as inspiration for many of his later poetic works. After attending the local school, he studied at the teacher training college in Tondern from 1838 to 1841. Groth subsequently became a teacher at the girls’ school in his native village and devoted his spare time to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. He took an interesting in local traditions and played a part in several unique to Dithmarschen.
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Hermann Paul
1846 - 1921 (75 years)
Hermann Otto Theodor Paul was a German philologist, linguist and lexicographer. Biography He studied at Berlin and Leipzig, and in 1874 became professor of German language and literature in the University of Freiburg. In 1893 he was appointed professor of German philology at the University of Munich. He was a prominent Neogrammarian.
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Nasir Khusraw
1004 - 1088 (84 years)
Nasir Khusraw was a Isma'ili poet, philosopher, traveler, and missionary for the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate. Despite being one of the most prominent Isma'ili philosophers and theologians of the Fatimids and the writer of many philosophical works intended for only the inner circle of the Isma'ili community, Nasir is best known to the general public as a poet and writer who ardently supported his native Persian tongue as an artistic and scientific language. All of Nasir's philosophical Isma'ili works are in Persian, a rarity in the Isma'ili literature of the Fatimids, which primarily used Arab...
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August von Kotzebue
1761 - 1819 (58 years)
August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue was a German dramatist and writer who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany. In 1817, one of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften. This murder gave Metternich the pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, cracked down on the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom in the states of the German Confederation.
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Nancy Mitford
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Nancy Freeman-Mitford , known as Nancy Mitford, was an English novelist, biographer, and journalist. The eldest of the Mitford sisters, she was regarded as one of the "bright young things" on the London social scene in the inter-war period. She wrote several novels about upper-class life in England and France, and is considered a sharp and often provocative wit. She also has a reputation as a writer of popular historical biographies.
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Ned Washington
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Ned Washington was an American lyricist born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Life and career Washington was nominated for eleven Academy Awards from 1940 to 1962. He won the Best Original Song award twice: in 1940 for "When You Wish Upon a Star" in Pinocchio and in 1952 for "High Noon " in High Noon.
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Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
1694 - 1773 (79 years)
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a British statesman, diplomat, man of letters, and an acclaimed wit of his time. Early life He was born in London to Philip Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Chesterfield, and Lady Elizabeth Savile, and known by the courtesy title of Lord Stanhope until the death of his father in 1726. Following the death of his mother in 1708, Stanhope was raised mainly by his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax. Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he left just over a year into his studies, after focusing on languages and oration. He subsequently embarked on th...
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Anatole Broyard
1920 - 1990 (70 years)
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir , were published after his death.
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Romain Gary
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Romain Gary , born Roman Kacew , was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names. He is considered a major writer of French literature of the second half of the 20th century. He was married to Lesley Blanch, then Jean Seberg.
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José Gorostiza
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
José Gorostiza Alcalá was a Mexican poet, educator, and diplomat. For his achievements in the poetic arts, he was made a member of the . Biography José Gorostiza was born in the riverine city of Villahermosa, then known as San Juan Bautista, to Celestino Gorostiza and Elvira Alcalá de Gorostiza. He was a descendant of the Spanish playwright Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza. His younger brother Celestino would also become an important artist. He moved to Mexico City to attend the National Preparatory School and later the Colegio Francés de Mascarones. After graduating from the Universidad Nacional ...
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Francis Scott Key
1779 - 1843 (64 years)
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of the text of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner". Key observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 during the War of 1812. He was inspired upon seeing the American flag still flying over the fort at dawn and wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry"; it was published within a week with the suggested tune of the popular song "To Anacreon in Heaven". The song with Key's lyrics became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and slowly gained in popularit...
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Dafydd ap Gwilym
1320 - 1380 (60 years)
Dafydd ap Gwilym is regarded as one of the leading Welsh poets and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages. Life R. Geraint Gruffydd suggests 1315- 1350 as the poet's dates; others place him a little later from 1320-40 1370-80.
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Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
1565 - 1601 (36 years)
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, KG, PC was an English nobleman and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Politically ambitious, and a committed general, he was placed under house arrest following a poor campaign in Ireland during the Nine Years' War in 1599. In 1601, he led an abortive coup d'état against the government of Elizabeth I and was executed for treason.
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Philip Massinger
1583 - 1640 (57 years)
Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.
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Joachim du Bellay
1522 - 1560 (38 years)
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a founder of La Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin.
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Herbert Weir Smyth
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Herbert Weir Smyth was an American classical scholar. His comprehensive grammar of Ancient Greek has become a standard reference on the subject in English, comparable to that of William Watson Goodwin, whom he succeeded as Eliott Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University.
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Fannie Hurst
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst also actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
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Chen Hengzhe
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Chen Hengzhe , pen name Sophia H. Z. Chen , was a pioneering writer in modern vernacular Chinese literature, a leader in the New Culture Movement, and the first female professor at a Chinese university. Chen is known for aiming to educate Chinese people by incorporating values from both Western culture and Chinese culture, producing many works reflecting these values.
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Pietro Bembo
1470 - 1547 (77 years)
Pietro Bembo, was an Italian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance , Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a standard language, became the modern Italian language. In the 16th century, Bembo's poetry, essays and books proved basic to reviving interest in the literary works of Petrarch. In the field of music, Bembo's literary writing techniques ...
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Kamini Roy
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Kamini Roy was a Bengali poet, social worker and feminist in British India. She was the first woman honours graduate in British India. Early life Born on 12 October 1864 in the village of Basunda, then in Bakerganj District of Bengal Presidency and now in Jhalokati District of Bangladesh, Roy joined Bethune School in 1883. One of the first girls to attend school in British India, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Sanskrit honours from Bethune College of the University of Calcutta in 1886 and started teaching there in the same year. Kadambini Ganguly, the country's second female honour...
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