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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#1251
Sylvère Lotringer
#7376
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Sylvère Lotringer was a French-born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.
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Rikki Ducornet
#19252
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rikki Ducornet is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as “linguistically explosive and socially relevant,” and praised for “deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.”
Go to Profile#1253
J. Yellowlees Douglas
#28022
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jane Yellowlees Douglas is a pioneer author and scholar of hypertext fiction. She began writing about hypermedia in the late 1980s, very early in the development of the medium. Her 1993 fiction I Have Said Nothing, was one of the first published works of hypertext fiction.
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Carlos Montemayor
#32700
Overall Influence
1947 - 2010 (63 years)
Carlos Montemayor was a Mexican novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, tenor, political analyst, and promoter of contemporary literature written in indigenous languages. He was a Member of the Mexican Academy of the Language.
Go to Profile#1255
Simon Bisley
#14329
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Simon Bisley is a British comic book artist best known for his 1990s work on ABC Warriors, Lobo and Sláine. Early life Simon Bisley began drawing when he was six years old. He is self-taught, with only a short one-year stay at an art college, saying "I found it very difficult to get any kind of feedback from the art teachers. They weren't interested at all in what I was doing, so I became kind of very introverted with regard to my artwork and yeah, I was just all self-taught."
Go to Profile#1256
Wright Morris
#17611
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Go to Profile#1257
Liz Rosenberg
#35245
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lizbeth Meg Rosenberg is an American poet, novelist, children's book author and book reviewer. She is currently a professor of English at Binghamton University, and in previous years has taught at Colgate University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hamilton College, Bennington College, and Hollins College. Her children's book reviews appear monthly in The Boston Globe.
Go to Profile#1258
Cormac McCarthy
#21767
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
Go to Profile#1259
Stephen Dobyns
#30298
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen J. Dobyns is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey. Life Dobyns was born on February 19, 1941, in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., an Episcopal minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, transferred to and graduated from Wayne State University in 1964, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.
Go to Profile#1260
Henry S. Taylor
#17161
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Henry Splawn Taylor is an American poet, academic, and translator. The author of more than 15 books of poems, translation, and nonfiction, he is the recipient of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Early life and education Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia, in rural Loudoun County, where he was raised as a Quaker. He went to high school at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Virginia in 1965 and a Master of Arts from Hollins University in 1966.
Go to Profile#1261
Piero Boitani
#29661
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Piero Boitani is an Italian literary critic. Life Born in Rome, Boitani received his Ph.D. from Cambridge while teaching there and has taught in the University of Pescara and University of Perugia. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome and has taught at the Gregorian University and at the University of Italian Switzerland.
Go to Profile#1262
Oscar Hijuelos
#27198
Overall Influence
1951 - 2013 (62 years)
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos was an American novelist. Of Cuban descent, during a year-long convalescence from a childhood illness spent in a Connecticut hospital he lost his knowledge of Spanish, his parents' native language. He was educated in New York City, and wrote short stories and advertising copy.
Go to Profile#1263
Steve Parkhouse
#15449
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Steve Parkhouse is a writer, artist and letterer who has worked for many British comics, especially 2000 AD and Doctor Who Magazine. Biography Parkhouse has worked in comics since 1967, when he drew the occasional "Power House Pin-Up" of Marvel superheroes for the back covers of Fantastic and Terrific, two British weeklies published by Odhams. In 1969 his first professional writing assignments appeared when he co-wrote two Marvel Comics stories, one starring the jungle lord Ka-Zar in Marvel Super-Heroes No. 19 , and the other starring the eponymous superspy in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. No.
Go to Profile#1264
Dennis Lee
#19271
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dennis Beynon Lee is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie. Life After attending high school at the University of Toronto Schools, Lee received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Toronto, where he coauthored articles in Acta Victoriana with Margaret Atwood. He taught English at the University's Victoria College from 1963 until 1967, at which time he became 'resource person' for Rochdale College.
Go to Profile#1265
Cristina Rivera Garza
#27111
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican author and professor best known for her fictional work, with various novels such as Nadie me verá llorar winning a number of Mexico’s highest literary awards as well as awards abroad. The author was born in the state of Tamaulipas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, and has developed her career in teaching and writing in both the United States and Mexico. She has taught history and creative writing at various universities and institutions, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico , Tec de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and University of California, San Diego, but currently holds a position at the University of Houston.
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Dave Gibbons
#17537
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Chester Gibbons is an English comics artist, writer and sometimes letterer. He is best known for his collaborations with writer Alan Moore, which include the miniseries Watchmen and the Superman story "For the Man Who Has Everything". He was an artist for 2000 AD, for which he contributed a large body of work from its first issue in 1977.
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Hans-Ulrich Treichel
#23590
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Treichel is a Germanist, novelist and poet. His earliest published books were collections of poetry, but prose writing has become a larger part of his output since the critical and commercial success of his first novel Der Verlorene . Treichel has also worked as an opera librettist, most prominently in collaboration with the composer Hans Werner Henze.
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Kai Brodersen
#11861
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kai Brodersen is a contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of Erfurt. He has edited, and translated, both ancient works and modern classical studies. His research focuses on "Applied Sciences" in antiquity, geography, historiography, rhetoric and ancient jokes, mythography and paradoxography, Septuagint studies and Aristeas, inscriptions and curse tablets, early Greek and Hellenistic history, Roman provinces , women and men in the Ancient World, turning points of Ancient History, history of classical scholarship and reception, often with twist - plus a ...
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Richard Janko
#26257
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Richard Charles Murray Janko is an Anglo-American classical scholar and the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Family and education Janko was born on May 30, 1955, the descendant of an Austro-Hungarian revolutionary who left Vienna in 1848 to find refuge in London.
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Florence King
#15310
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Florence Virginia King was an American novelist, essayist and columnist. While her early writings focused on the American South and those who live there, much of King's later work was published in National Review. Until her retirement in 2002, her column in National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner", was known for "serving up a smorgasbord of curmudgeonly critiques about rubes and all else bothersome to the Queen of Mean", as the magazine put it. After leaving retirement in 2006, she began writing a new column for National Review titled "The Bent Pin."
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Katie Roiphe
#15703
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus . She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End , and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an art...
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P. E. Easterling
#34415
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001. She was the 36th person and the first — and, so far, only — woman to hold the post.
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Adrian Mitchell
#11350
Overall Influence
1932 - 2008 (76 years)
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".
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Francisco Brines
#39126
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Francisco Brines Bañó was a Spanish poet. Biography Brines was born in Oliva . He is regarded as one of the Generation of '50 of Spanish poets, along with Claudio Rodríguez, Jaime Gil de Biedma and Ángel González.
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Neil Genzlinger
#19640
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Neil Genzlinger is an American playwright, editor, book reviewer, and theatre and television critic who frequently writes for The New York Times. Family Genzlinger is a grandson of the late The Philadelphia Bulletin columnist Don Rose. He has two daughters: Abby, who has Rett syndrome, and Emily. Abby has appeared in Julia Roberts' documentary "Silent Angels." Emily is a law student and recipient of the prestigious Gideon's Promise fellowship for aspiring public defenders.
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Jonathan Gottschall
#16826
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Jonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar specializing in literature and evolution. He holds the title of Distinguished Fellow in the English department of Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of eight books.
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Vittore Branca
#17813
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Vittore Branca was a philologist, literary critic, and Italian academic. He was a professor emeritus of Italian literature at the University of Padua until his death in 2004, and one of the most acclaimed contemporary scholars of Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
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Georg Johannesen
#31621
Overall Influence
1931 - 2005 (74 years)
Georg Johannesen was a Norwegian author and professor at the University of Bergen. Background He was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of Knut Johan Johannesen and Ingeborg Malene Olsdatter Skaalevik . Johannesen graduated artium at Bergen Cathedral School in 1949. He studied history, English and Norwegian at University of Oslo and took his master's degree in Literature History in 1960. He wrote his dissertation Vårmotivet hos Olaf Bull on the poetry of Olaf Bull .
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Verlyn Klinkenborg
#26670
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Verlyn Klinkenborg is an American non-fiction author, academic, and former newspaper editor, known for his writings on rural America. Early life and education Klinkenborg was born in Meeker, Colorado and raised on a farm in Iowa. He attended elementary school in Clarion, Iowa until the 6th grade before his family relocated to Osage, Iowa. His family then moved to Sacramento, California.
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Jerome Loving
#22491
Overall Influence
Jerome Loving is an American literary critic and academic. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature and Culture at Texas A&M University at College Station, and the author of several books about Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson. His Jack and Norman: A State-raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song is under option by Village Roadshow Entertainment Group. He served as a Fulbright Professor in Leningrad in 1978 and Paris in 1989–90. He also taught at the Sorbonne in 1984 and at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.
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Michelene Wandor
#22215
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michelene Dinah Wandor , known from 1963 to at least 1979 as Michelene Victor, is an English playwright, critic, broadcaster, poet, lecturer, and musician. Birth and education She was born Michelene Samuels in Essex, England, in 1940. Her parents, Abraham Samuels and Rosalia Wander, were early 20th-century Russian Jewish émigrés.
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Andrea Barrett
#13441
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.
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Maria Rita Kehl
#6964
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Maria Rita Kehl, ORB is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, journalist, poet, essayist, cronista and literary critic. In 2010, she won the Jabuti Award in the Education, Psychology and Psychoanalysis category and the Human Rights Award from the Brazilian government in the Media and Human Rights category.
Go to Profile#1284
Maxim D. Shrayer
#22328
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual Russian-American author, translator, and literary scholar, and a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Biography Shrayer was born and grew up in Moscow, USSR, in the family of the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, and the translator Emilia Shrayer. Among his ancestors on the Shrayer side is the Russian-Israeli writer Batya Kahana . Together with his parents he spent almost nine years as a refusenik before immigrating to the US in the summer of 1987. Shrayer attended Moscow University, Brown University , Rutgers University , and Yale University .
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Fred Moten
#17214
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside; he previously taught at Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine . He has published num...
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Alissa Nutting
#40930
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alissa Nutting is an American author, creative writing professor and television writer. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB and the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.
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Robert Polito
#32162
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a professor of writing.
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Arnošt Lustig
#21443
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Arnošt Lustig was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust. Life and work Lustig was born in Prague. As a Jewish boy in Czechoslovakia during World War II, he was sent in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where he was later transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, followed by time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He returned to Prague in ti...
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Alan Bennett
#10945
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Alan Bennett is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George . In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
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George Barker
#21308
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
George Granville Barker was an English poet, identified with the New Apocalyptics movement, which reacted against 1930s realism with mythical and surrealistic themes. His long liaison with Elizabeth Smart was the subject of her cult-novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
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Robert Stone
#20537
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Robert Anthony Stone was an American novelist, journalist, and college professor. He was five times a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, which he did receive in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers. Time magazine included this novel in its list 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Stone was also twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Go to Profile#1292
Chris Baldick
#19098
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Professor Chris Baldick is a British academic who teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has worked in the fields of literary criticism, literary theory, literary history and literary terminology. He was previously Senior Lecturer in English at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in Ormskirk.
Go to Profile#1293
Wolfgang Kubin
#16973
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Wolfgang Kubin is a German poet, essayist, sinologist and translator of literary works. He is the former director of the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. Kubin has frequently been a guest professor at universities in China, for instance at Beijing Foreign Studies University, but also in Madison, Wisconsin and in Jerusalem. Since 1989, Kubin has been the editor of the journals ORIENTIERUNGEN: Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens and Minima sinica: Zeitschrift zum chinesischen Geist.
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Elder Olson
#25669
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Elder James Olson was an American poet, teacher and literary critic. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Carl Schurz High School. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, he published a volume of poetry. Thereafter, he published multiple volumes of poetry and literary criticism during his career, for which he received multiple awards. After graduating with a BA in 1934, he was awarded an MA from the University of Chicago in 1935. The same year he received a Friends of Literature award. In 1937, he married Ann Elisabeth Jones and the couple had two children . He was awarded a Ph.D.
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Alice McDermott
#20263
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.
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Stephen Graham Jones
#20521
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfoot Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. His most widely known works include the horror novels The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Night of the Mannequins.
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Delia Sherman
#35294
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Cordelia Caroline Sherman , known professionally as Delia Sherman, is an American fantasy writer and editor. Her novel The Porcelain Dove won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Background Sherman attended The Chapin School in New York. She received her B.A. at Vassar College in 1972, her Masters of Arts from Brown University in 1975, and her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1981. She has worked as a lecturer at Boston University from 1978 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1992; and a reviewer with the Women's Review of Books, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Review Annual between 1988 and 1989.
Go to Profile#1298
Dudley Randall
#17326
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Dudley Randall was an African-American poet and poetry publisher from Detroit, Michigan. He founded a pioneering publishing company called Broadside Press in 1965, which published many leading African-American writers, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others.
Go to Profile#1299
Michael von Albrecht
#46367
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Michael von Albrecht is a German classical scholar and translator, as well as a poet writing in Latin. Life The son of the composer Georg Albrecht first attended the Music Academy in Stuttgart, where he graduated in 1955 after taking the state examination. In Tübingen and Paris, he then studied classical philology and Indology in 1959. In 1964, Albrecht was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Heidelberg, where he remained until his retirement in 1998. He was also the Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1981.
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Kundō Koyama
#30080
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kundō Koyama is a Japanese writer. He is best known for scripting the television series Iron Chef and the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film recipient Departures. Koyama has also worked under the pen name Udon Kumayakko, an anagram of his real name read backwards in Japanese.
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