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,
#10601
Carlo Collodi
1826 - 1890 (64 years)
Carlo Lorenzini , better known by the pen name Carlo Collodi , was an Italian author, humourist, and journalist, widely known for his fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Early life Collodi was born in Florence on 24 November 1826. His mother Angiolina Orzali Lorenzini was a seamstress from Collodi, the town from which he later took the pen name, and his father Domenico Lorenzini was a cook. Both parents worked for the Ginori Lisci. Carlo was the eldest child in the family and he had ten siblings; seven died at a young age. He spent most of his childhood in the town of Collodi where his mother was born.
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Malik ibn Anas
711 - 795 (84 years)
Malik ibn Anas , whose full name is Mālik bin Anas bin Mālik bin Abī ʿĀmir bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith bin Ghaymān bin Khuthayn bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith al-Aṣbaḥī al-Ḥumyarī al-Madanī , reverently known as al-Imām Mālik by Sunni Muslims, was a Muslim jurist, theologian, and hadith traditionist. Born in the city of Medina, Malik rose to become the premier scholar of prophetic traditions in his day, which he sought to apply to "the whole legal life" in order to create a systematic method of Muslim jurisprudence which would only further expand with the passage of time. Referred to as the "Imam of Medi...
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Thomas Wolfe
1900 - 1938 (38 years)
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.
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Georg Friedrich Creuzer
1771 - 1858 (87 years)
Georg Friedrich Creuzer was a German philologist and archaeologist. Life He was born at Marburg, the son of a bookbinder. After studying at Marburg and at the University of Jena, he went to Leipzig as a private tutor; but in 1802 he was appointed professor at Marburg, and two years later professor of philology and ancient history at Heidelberg. He held the latter position for nearly forty-five years, with the exception of a short time spent at the University of Leiden, where his health was affected by the Dutch climate. He was one of the principal founders of the Philological Seminary established at Heidelberg in 1807.
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Chikamatsu Monzaemon
1653 - 1725 (72 years)
Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist". His most famous plays deal with double-suicides of honor bound lovers. Of his puppet plays, around 70 are jidaimono and 24 are sewamono . The domestic plays are today considered the core of his artistic achievement, particularly works such as The Courier for Hell and The Love Suicides at Amijima . His histories are viewed less posi...
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Ogden Nash
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared by The New York Times the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.
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Théodore de Banville
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century. Biography Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the amusements of his companions. On leaving school with but slender means of support, he devoted himself to letters, and in 1842 published his first volume of verse , which was followed by Les Stalactites in 1846. ...
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William Jones
1746 - 1794 (48 years)
Sir William Jones was a British philologist, orientalist and a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
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Dositej Obradović
1742 - 1811 (69 years)
Dositej Obradović was a Serbian writer, biographer, diarist, philosopher, pedagogue, educational reformer, linguist, polyglot and the first minister of education of Serbia. An influential protagonist of the Serbian national and cultural renaissance, he advocated Enlightenment and rationalist ideas, while remaining a Serbian patriot and an adherent of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
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Lucian Blaga
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. Biography Blaga was born on 9 May 1895 in Lámkerék , near Gyulafehérvár , Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, his father being an Orthodox priest. He later described his early childhood, in the autobiographical The Chronicle and the Song of Ages, as "under the sign of the incredible absence of the word".
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George Abbott
1887 - 1995 (108 years)
George Francis Abbott was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director and producer whose career spanned eight decades. He received numerous honors including six Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982. the National Medal of Arts in 1990. and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
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Kenneth Grahame
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Kenneth Grahame was a British writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows , a classic of children's literature, as well as The Reluctant Dragon. Both books were later adapted for stage and film, of which A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall, based on part of The Wind in the Willows, was the first. Other adaptations include Cosgrove Hall Films' The Wind in the Willows , and the Walt Disney films .
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Michael Madhusudan Dutt
1824 - 1873 (49 years)
Michael Madhusudan Dutt was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature. Early life Dutt was born in Sagardari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Bengal, to a Hindu family. His family being reasonably well-off, Dutt received an education in the English language and additional tutorship in English at home. Rajnarayan had intended for this Western education to open the doors for a government position for his son.
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Louis Zukofsky
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
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César Vallejo
1892 - 1938 (46 years)
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-c...
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Jan Kasprowicz
1860 - 1926 (66 years)
Jan Kasprowicz was a poet, playwright, critic and translator; a foremost representative of Young Poland. Biography Kasprowicz was born in the village of Szymborze within the Province of Posen, to an illiterate peasant family. From 1870 he studied in Prussian gymnasia in Inowrazlaw , Posen , Oppeln , Ratibor , and in 1884 graduated from Saint Mary Magdalene Gymnasium in Poznań. He studied philosophy and literature in German universities in Leipzig and Breslau. During his studies he began having articles and poetry published, working with various Polish magazines. For his activities in sociali...
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Machado de Assis
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis , often known by his surnames as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho , was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. In 1897, he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was multilingual, having taught himself French, English, German and Greek later in life.
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Victorien Sardou
1831 - 1908 (77 years)
Victorien Sardou was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca is based, and Fédora and Madame Sans-Gêne that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora and Madame Sans-Gêne by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.
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George Chapman
1559 - 1634 (75 years)
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. William Minto speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.
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Shinobu Orikuchi
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Shinobu Orikuchi, also known as Chōkū Shaku, was a Japanese ethnologist, linguist, folklorist, novelist, and poet. As a disciple of Kunio Yanagita, he established an original academic field named "Orikuchiism", which is a mixture of Japanese folklore, Japanese classics, and Shintō. He produced many works in a diversity of fields covering the history of literature, folkloric performing arts, folklore itself, Japanese language, the classics study, Shintōology, ancient study, and so on. Yukio Mishima once called him the "Japanese Walter Pater".
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Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
1836 - 1870 (34 years)
Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida , better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer , was a Spanish Romantic poet and writer , also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented in drawing. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in Spanish literature, and is considered by some as the most read writer after Miguel de Cervantes. He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier. He was associated with the romanticism and post-romanticism movements and wrote while realism was enjoying success in Spain. He was moderately well known during his life, but it was after his death that most of his works were published.
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George Crabbe
1754 - 1832 (78 years)
George Crabbe was an English poet, surgeon and clergyman. He is best known for his early use of the realistic narrative form and his descriptions of middle and working-class life and people. In the 1770s, Crabbe began his career as a doctor's apprentice, later becoming a surgeon. In 1780, he travelled to London to make a living as a poet. After encountering serious financial difficulty and being unable to have his work published, he wrote to the statesman and author Edmund Burke for assistance. Burke was impressed enough by Crabbe's poems to promise to help him in any way he could. The two be...
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Thomas Bernhard
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard's body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II." He is widely considered to be one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era.
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Sami Frashëri
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Sami bey Frashëri or Şemseddin Sâmi was an Ottoman Albanian writer, philosopher, playwright and a prominent figure of the Rilindja Kombëtare, the National Renaissance movement of Albania, together with his two brothers Abdyl and Naim. He also supported Turkish nationalism against its Ottoman counterpart, along with secularism against theocracy.
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Georges Feydeau
1862 - 1921 (59 years)
Georges-Léon-Jules-Marie Feydeau was a French playwright of the Belle Époque era, remembered for his farces, written between 1886 and 1914. Feydeau was born in Paris to middle-class parents and raised in an artistic and literary environment. From an early age he was fascinated by the theatre, and as a child he wrote plays and organised his schoolfellows into a drama group. In his teens he wrote comic monologues and moved on to writing longer plays. His first full-length comedy, , was well received, but was followed by a string of comparative failures. He gave up writing for a time in the ear...
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Austin Warren
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Austin Warren was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English. Childhood and education Edward Austin Warren Jr. was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1899, as the elder of two sons by Edward Austin Warren, city alderman of Waltham and expert butcher, and Nellie Myra Anderson Warren. He attended public grammar school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and briefly attended Waltham High School, where he received instruction in Latin and studied Esperanto independently. At the age of thirteen, Warren and his family relocated to a lonely farm in Stow, Massachusetts. He attend...
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Snorri Sturluson
1179 - 1241 (62 years)
Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was elected twice as lawspeaker of the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He is commonly thought to have authored or compiled portions of the Prose Edda, which is a major source for what is today known as Norse mythology, and Heimskringla, a history of the Norse kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga. He was assassinated in 1241 by men claiming to be ag...
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Leonid Andreyev
1871 - 1919 (48 years)
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
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Adelbert von Chamisso
1781 - 1838 (57 years)
Adelbert von Chamisso was a German poet,writer and botanist. He was commonly known in French as Adelbert de Chamisso de Boncourt, a name referring to the family estate at Boncourt. Life The son of Louis Marie, Count of Chamisso, by his marriage to Anne Marie Gargam, Chamisso began life as Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot at the château of Boncourt at Ante, in Champagne, France, the ancestral seat of his family. His name appears in several forms, one of the most common being Ludolf Karl Adelbert von Chamisso.
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Bulleh Shah
1680 - 1757 (77 years)
Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri , known popularly as Baba Bulleh Shah and Bulleya, was a 17th and 18th-century Punjabi revolutionary philosopher, reformer and a Sufi poet, universally regarded as the "Father of Punjabi Enlightenment". He spoke against powerful religious, political and social institutions. He lived and was buried in Kasur .
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Brendan Behan
1923 - 1964 (41 years)
Brendan Francis Aidan Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and Irish Republican, an activist who wrote in both English and Irish. He was named by the US website Irish Central as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time.
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Jean Giono
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Jean Giono was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France. First period Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent and his mother a laundry woman. He spent the majority of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Forced by family needs to leave school at the age of sixteen and get a job in a bank, he nevertheless continued to read voraciously, in particular the great classic works of literature including the Bible, Homer's Iliad, the works of Virgil, and the Tragiques of Agrippa d'Aubigné. He c...
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Vaslav Nijinsky
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish ancestry. He is regarded as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century. He was celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could dance en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time, and was admired for his seemingly gravity-defying leaps.
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Jan Mukařovský
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Jan Mukařovský was a Czech literary, linguistic, and aesthetic theorist. Mukařovský was professor at the Charles University of Prague. He is well known for his association with early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism. Among other achievements, he applied ideas from Geneva linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure to the analysis of literary and artistic expression, systematically applying and extending the concept of linguistic function to literary works and their reception in different periods. Mukařovsk...
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Osamu Dazai
1909 - 1948 (39 years)
Shūji Tsushima, known by his pen name Osamu Dazai, was a Japanese novelist and author. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human , are considered modern-day classics.
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Marc Connelly
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Marcus Cook Connelly was an American playwright, director, producer, performer, and lyricist. He was a key member of the Algonquin Round Table, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930. Biography Connelly was born to actor and hotelier Patrick Joseph Connelly and actress Mabel Fowler Cook in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. His father died in 1902. Connelly attended Trinity Hall boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania, after which he began collecting money for ads in The Pittsburgh Press to help to support his mother. He began writing plays at the age of five.
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Theodor Fontane
1819 - 1898 (79 years)
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist author. He published the first of his novels, for which he is best known today, only at age 58 after a career as a journalist.
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Edward FitzGerald
1809 - 1883 (74 years)
Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer. His most famous poem is the first and best-known English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which has kept its reputation and popularity since the 1860s.
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Henry Vaughan
1621 - 1695 (74 years)
Henry Vaughan was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author and translator writing in English, and a medical physician. His religious poetry appeared in Silex Scintillans in 1650, with a second part in 1655. In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished was published. Meanwhile he had been persuaded by reading the religious poet George Herbert to renounce "idle verse". The prose Mount of Olives and Solitary Devotions show his authenticity and depth of convictions. Two more volumes of secular verse followed, ostensibly without his sanction, but it is his religious verse that has been acclaimed.
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Thomas Holley Chivers
1809 - 1858 (49 years)
Thomas Holley Chivers was an American doctor-turned-poet from the state of Georgia. He is best known for his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe and his controversial defense of the poet after his death.
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Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
1690 - 1751 (61 years)
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai , commonly known by the honorifics Lakhino Latif, Latif Ghot, Bhittai, and Bhit Jo Shah, was a Sindhi Sufi mystic and poet from Pakistan, widely considered to be the greatest poet of the Sindhi language.
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Ogiwara Seisensui
1884 - 1976 (92 years)
was the pen-name of Ogiwara Tōkichi, a Japanese haiku poet active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan. Early life Ogiwara Tōkichi was born in Shinmei, Shiba, Tokyo City , the second son of a merchant who owned a general goods store called Nitta-ya. The Ogiwara family was originally from Takada, Echigo Province , and his grandfather Tōkichi had moved to Edo as a young man. Both of his siblings died in infancy. Although he attended Seisoku Junior High School, Ogiwara was expelled after publishing a student newspaper criticizing the school's educational methods and administration. After ...
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Ernest Thompson Seton
1860 - 1946 (86 years)
Ernest Thompson Seton was an English-born Canadian-American author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians in 1902 , and one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.
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Jovan Sterija Popović
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Jovan Sterija Popović was a Serbian playwright, poet, lawyer, philosopher and pedagogue who taught at the Belgrade Higher School. Sterija was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the leading Serbian intellectuals and he is regarded as one of the best comic playwrights in Serbian literature.
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Michael Drayton
1563 - 1631 (68 years)
Michael Drayton was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era, continuing to write through the reign of James I and into the reign of Charles I. Many of his works consisted of historical poetry. He was also the first English-language author to write odes in the style of Horace. He died on 23 December 1631 in London.
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Randall Jarrell
1914 - 1965 (51 years)
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
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Erskine Caldwell
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States, in novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim.
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Leopoldo Marechal
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Leopoldo Marechal was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century. Biographical notes Born in Buenos Aires into a family of French and Spanish descent, Marechal became a primary school teacher and a high school professor after obtaining his degree despite enormous economic difficulties. During the 1920s he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martín Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos and Días como flechas , tended towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer showed a blend of novelty and a more classical style.
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Oscar Levertin
1862 - 1906 (44 years)
Oscar Ivar Levertin was a Swedish poet, critic and literary historian. Levertin was a dominant voice of the Swedish cultural scene from 1897, when he started writing influential high-profile essays and reviews in the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet.
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Thomas Love Peacock
1785 - 1866 (81 years)
Thomas Love Peacock was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting: characters at a table discussing and criticising the philosophical opinions of the day.
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