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,
#10651
Christopher Isherwood
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin , a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret ; A Single Man , adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind , a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
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Jean de La Fontaine
1621 - 1695 (74 years)
Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.
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August Derleth
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House . Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
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Kabir
1398 - 1518 (120 years)
Kabir was a well-known Indian mystic poet and saint. His writings influenced Hinduism's Bhakti movement, and his verses are found in Sikhism's scripture Guru Granth Sahib, the Satguru Granth Sahib of Saint Garib Das, and Kabir Sagar of Dharamdas. Today, his poems are not only sung by Hindus and Sikhs, but also by Muslims—especially Sufis.
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John Tzetzes
1110 - 1180 (70 years)
John Tzetzes was a Byzantine poet and grammarian who lived at Constantinople in the 12th century. He is known for making significant contributions in preserving much valuable information from ancient Greek literature and scholarship. Of his numerous works, the most important one is the Book of Histories, also known as Chiliades . The work is a long poem containing knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere and serves as commentary on Tzetzes' own letters. Two of his other important works are the Allegoriai on the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are long didactic poems containing interpretations of ...
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John Betjeman
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Sir John Betjeman was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
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Paul Éluard
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Éluard , born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, a matronymic borrowed from his maternal grandmother. He adhered to Dadaism and became one of the pillars of Surrealism by opening the way to artistic action politically committed to the Communist Party.
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Shota Rustaveli
1172 - 1216 (44 years)
Shota Rustaveli , mononymously known simply as Rustaveli, was a medieval Georgian poet. He is considered to be the pre-eminent poet of the Georgian Golden Age and one of the greatest contributors to Georgian literature. Rustaveli was the author of The Knight in the Panther's Skin, a Georgian national epic poem.
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Hermann Hesse
1877 - 1962 (85 years)
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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William Godwin
1756 - 1836 (80 years)
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in t...
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Guy de Maupassant
1850 - 1893 (43 years)
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a 19th-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story, as well as a representative of the naturalist school, depicting human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.
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George MacDonald
1824 - 1905 (81 years)
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
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Ludwig Tieck
1773 - 1853 (80 years)
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early life Tieck was born in Berlin, the son of a rope-maker. His siblings were the sculptor Christian Friedrich Tieck and the poet Sophie Tieck. He was educated at the , where he learned Greek and Latin, as required in most preparatory schools. He also began learning Italian at a very young age, from a grenadier with whom he became acquainted. Through this friendship, Tieck was given a first-hand look at the poor, which could be linked to his work as a Romanticist.
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Hugh MacDiarmid
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Christopher Murray Grieve , best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid , was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 but left in 1933 due to his Marxist–Leninist views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain the following year only to be expelled in 1938 for his nationalist sympathies. He would subsequently stand as a parliamentary candidate for both the Scottish...
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Alfred de Musset
1810 - 1857 (47 years)
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing the autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle . Biography Musset was born in Paris. His family was upper-class but poor; his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. Musset's mother came from similar circumstances, and her role as a society hostess – for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons and dinners held in the Musset residence – left a lasting impression on young Alfred.
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Clemens Brentano
1778 - 1842 (64 years)
Clemens Wenzeslaus Brentano was a German poet and novelist, and a major figure of German Romanticism. He was the uncle, via his brother Christian, of Franz and Lujo Brentano. Biography Clemens Brentano was born to Peter Anton Brentano and Maximiliane von La Roche, a wealthy merchant family in Frankfurt on 9 September 1778. His father's family was of Italian descent. His maternal grandmother was Sophie von La Roche. His sister was writer Bettina von Arnim, who, at a young age, lionised and corresponded with Goethe, and, in 1835, published the correspondence as Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde .
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Alice B. Toklas
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein. Early life Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco into a middle-class Polish Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather was a rabbi, whose son Feivel Toklas moved to San Francisco in 1863. In 1876, Ferdinand Toklas married Emma Levinsky and they had two children: Alice and her brother Clarence Ferdinand .
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Lord Alfred Douglas
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas , also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900.
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Osip Mandelstam
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school. Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repressions of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.
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Thomas Gray
1716 - 1771 (55 years)
Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. Gray was a self-critical writer who published only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular. He was even offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1757 after the death of Colley Cibber, though he declined.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and hackwork verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.
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Garabet Ibrăileanu
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Garabet Ibrăileanu was a Romanian-Armenian literary critic and theorist, writer, translator, sociologist, University of Iași professor , and, together with Paul Bujor and Constantin Stere, for long main editor of the Viața Românească literary magazine between 1906 and 1930. He published many of his works under the pen name Cezar Vraja.
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Vittorio Alfieri
1749 - 1803 (54 years)
Count Vittorio Alfieri was an Italian dramatist and poet, considered the "founder of Italian tragedy." He wrote nineteen tragedies, sonnets, satires, and a notable autobiography. Early life Alfieri was born at Asti, Kingdom of Sardinia, now in Piedmont.
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Patrick White
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Patrick Victor Martindale White was a British-born Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and stream of consciousness techniques. In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation, the only Australian to have been awarded the prize. White was also the inaugural recipient of the Miles Franklin Award...
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Kalhana
Kalhana was the author of Rajatarangini , an account of the history of Kashmir. He wrote the work in Sanskrit between 1148 and 1149. All information regarding his life has to be deduced from his own writing, a major scholar of which is Mark Aurel Stein.
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Edith Sitwell
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
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Jean Giraudoux
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. Giraudoux's dominant theme is the relationship between man and woman—or in some cases, between man and some unattainable ideal.
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John Cowper Powys
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance , Weymouth Sands , and Maiden Castle have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography.
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Titu Maiorescu
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century.
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Alexander Afanasyev
1826 - 1871 (45 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk taless, one of the largest collections of folklore in the world. This collection was not strictly Russian, but included folk tales from Ukraine and Belarus alongside Russian folk tales. The first edition of his collection was published in eight volumes from 1855 to 1867, earning him the reputation of being the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm.
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William Congreve
1670 - 1729 (59 years)
William Congreve was an English playwright, poet and Whig politician. His works, which form an important component of Restoration literature, were known for their use of satire and the comedy of manners genre. Notable plays he wrote include The Old Bachelor , The Double Dealer , Love for Love , The Mourning Bride and The Way of the World . Dying in London, Congreve was buried at the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
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Alfonso Reyes
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Alfonso Reyes Ochoa was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and has been acclaimed as one of the greatest authors in Spanish language. He served as ambassador of Mexico to Argentina and Brazil.
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Jules Laforgue
1860 - 1887 (27 years)
Jules Laforgue was a Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist". Laforgue was a model for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, including for Renoir's 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party.
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Charles Olson
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
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Bennett Cerf
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Bennett Alfred Cerf was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for over 17 years on the panel game show What's My Line?
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Eugen Lovinescu
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Eugen Lovinescu was a Romanian modernist literary historian, literary critic, academic, and novelist, who in 1919 established the Sburătorul literary club. He was the father of Monica Lovinescu, and the uncle of , , and Anton Holban. He was elected to the Romanian Academy posthumously, in 1991.
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Nelly Sachs
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Nelly Sachs was a German–Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is ; other works include the poems "" , "" , and the collections of poetry , , , and . She was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Zelda Fitzgerald
1900 - 1948 (48 years)
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage.
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Garcilaso de la Vega
1503 - 1536 (33 years)
Garcilaso de la Vega, KOS was a Spanish soldier and poet. Although not the first or the only one to do so, he was the most influential poet to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms, poetic techniques, and themes to Spain. He was well known in poetic circles during his lifetime, and his poetry has continued to be popular without interruption until the present. His poetry was published posthumously by Juan Boscán in 1543, and it has been the subject of several annotated editions, the first and most famous of which appeared in 1574.
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Andrei Bely
1880 - 1934 (54 years)
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely , was a Russian novelist, Symbolist poet, theorist and literary critic. He was a committed anthroposophist and follower of Rudolf Steiner. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the third-greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. The Andrei Bely Prize , one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. His poems were set to music and performed by Russian singer-songwriters.
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Marie de France
1101 - 1300 (199 years)
Marie de France was a poet, possibly born in what is now France, who lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an unknown court, but she and her work were almost certainly known at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts. However, one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse.
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Frank Wedekind
1864 - 1918 (54 years)
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes , is considered to anticipate expressionism and was influential in the development of epic theatre.
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Basil Bunting
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist tradition in English. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud: he was an accomplished reader of his own work.
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Nikolay Karamzin
1766 - 1826 (60 years)
Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin was a Russian historian, romantic writer, poet and critic. He is best remembered for his fundamental History of the Russian State, a 12-volume national history. Early life Karamzin was born in the small village of Mikhailovka near Simbirsk in the Znamenskoye family estate. Another version exists that he was born in 1765 in the Mikhailovka village of the Orenburg Governorate where his father served, and in recent years Orenburg historians have been actively disputing the official version. His father Mikhail Yegorovich Karamzin was a retired Kapitan of the Imper...
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Alcaeus of Mytilene
630 BC - 560 BC (70 years)
Alcaeus of Mytilene was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was a contemporary of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.
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William Caxton
1422 - 1491 (69 years)
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.
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Muhammad Iqbal
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Sir Muhammad Iqbal , was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is considered among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan. He is commonly referred to by the honorific Allama .
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Compton Mackenzie
1883 - 1972 (89 years)
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Hugh MacDiarmid, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was knighted in 1952.
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Bertha von Suttner
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was an Austro-Bohemian noblewoman, pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate , the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian laureate.
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Pedro Salinas
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Pedro Salinas y Serrano was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic. In 1937, he delivered the Turnbull lectures at Johns Hopkins University. These were later published under the title Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry.
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