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,
#1501
Joan Aiken
#25250
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Night Fall.
Go to Profile#1502
Macha Rosenthal
#48083
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Macha Louis Rosenthal was an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. The W. B. Yeats Society of New York renamed their award for achievement in Yeats studies the M. L. Rosenthal Award after Rosenthal's death. His 1959 essay, Poetry as Confession, is credited with being the first application of the term 'confession' to the writing of poetry and therefore for the naming of the confessional poetry movement.
Go to Profile#1503
Celia Britton
#21891
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Celia Margaret Britton, FBA is a British scholar of French Caribbean literature and thought. She was Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen from 1991 to 2002 and Professor of French at University College London from 2003 to 2011. She had previously lectured at King's College London and the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#1504
Luis Britto García
#19158
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Luis Britto García is a Venezuelan writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction has been recognised twice with the Casa de Las Américas Prize, for his works Rajatabla and Abrapalabra . In 2002, he was the winner of Venezuela's National Prize for Literature, given as a lifetime achievement award. In 2005 he was recognized with the Ezequiel Martínez Estrada honorary award of Casa de Las Américas. In May 2012, he was appointed by President Hugo Chávez to the Venezuelan Council of State, "the highest circle of advisers to the president" provided for in the Venezuelan Constitution.
Go to Profile#1505
David Bevington
#26876
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
David Martin Bevington was an American literary scholar. He was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, and the college at the University of Chicago, where he taught since 1967, as well as chair of Theatre and Performance Studies. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specialized in British drama of the Renaissance, and edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition.
Go to Profile#1506
Armando Uribe
#15193
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Armando Uribe Arce was a Chilean writer, poet, lawyer, and diplomat. Biography Uribe was born in Santiago. He was educated at the Saint George's College. He later studied law in the University of Chile and received his law degree in 1959, where he served as a law professor for over 30 years.
Go to Profile#1507
Margaret Clunies Ross
#35976
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Margaret Beryl Clunies Ross is a medievalist who was until her retirement in 2009 the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project of editing a new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry. She has also written articles on Australian Aboriginal rituals and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Go to Profile#1508
Chung Ling
#26622
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Chung Ling is a Taiwan-Chinese writer, critic, educator and translator. Her name also appears as Zhong Ling.[1] She was born in Chongqing in Sichuan province, a native Cantonese and came to Taiwan with her family in 1950 from Japan. Zhong was educated at a girls' school in Kaohsiung, at Tunghai University and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.[2] She taught at State University of New York at Albany, at Hong Kong University at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, where she became Dean of Liberal Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University where she served as chair professor, Dean of Arts ...
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Lydia R. Diamond
#27425
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Lydia R. Diamond is an American playwright and professor. Among her most popular plays are The Bluest Eye , an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel; Stick Fly ; Harriet Jacobs ; and Smart People . Her plays have received national attention and acclaim, receiving the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an LA Weekly Theater Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild of America.
Go to Profile#1510
Bernhard Bischoff
#32645
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Bernhard Bischoff was a German historian, paleographer, and philologist; he was born in Altendorf , and he died in Munich. Biography He was the son of Emil Bischoff and Charlotte von Gersdorff, who died giving birth to him. He received a Pietistic education during his youth. He married Hanne Oehler in 1935 and lived the majority of his life in Bavaria outside of academia. Before he earned his doctorate in 1933, under the direction of Paul Lehmann, he was recruited by the American paleographer E. A. Lowe as an assistant for the . He would work on this achievement until 1972, cataloging Latin manuscripts of the 9th century.
Go to Profile#1511
Yulian Semyonov
#16702
Overall Influence
1931 - 1993 (62 years)
Yulian Semyonovich Semyonov , pen-name of Yulian Semyonovich Lyandres , was a Soviet and Russian writer of spy fiction and detective fiction, also scriptwriter and poet. He is well known for creating the fictional spy Stierlitz.
Go to Profile#1512
Sarah Dunant
#16234
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sarah Dunant is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence. Early life Dunant was born in 1950 and raised in London. She is the daughter of David Dunant, a former Welsh airline steward who later became a manager at British Airways, and his French wife Estelle, who grew up in Bangalore, India.
Go to Profile#1513
Barbara Cassin
#5113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#1514
Nick Flynn
#30112
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His writing is characterized by lyric, distilled moments, which blur the boundaries of various genres. Many of his books are structured using a collage technique, which creates narratives with fractured, mosaic qualities. His work can be classified as récit—a French term for writing that is not the narration of an event, but an event itself. Several of his books are what he refers to as "siblings" to each other, in that they examine similar material from various perspectives.
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Dan Jacobson
#19456
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Dan Jacobson was a South African novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist of Lithuanian Jewish descent. Early life and career Dan Jacobson was born 7 March 1929, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his parents' families had come to avoid the persecution of Jews and to escape poverty in their European homelands. His father, Hyman Michael Jacobson, was born in Ilūkste, Latvia, in 1885. His mother, Liebe Jacobson, was born in Kelme, Lithuania, in 1896. Jacobson had two older brothers, Israel Joshua and Hirsh, and a younger sister, Aviva. His mother's family emigrated to South Africa in 1919, after the death of his grandfather.
Go to Profile#1516
Meghan O'Rourke
#14882
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic. Background and education O'Rourke was born January 26, 1976, in Brooklyn, New York. The eldest of three children born to Paul and Barbara O’Rourke, she had two younger brothers. Her mother was a longtime teacher and administrator at Saint Ann's, an elite independent school in Brooklyn, and later headmaster of the Pierrepont School in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, a classicist and Egyptologist, also taught at Saint Ann's and Pierrepont. O'Rourke attended St. Ann's through high school. She earned a bachelor's of arts degree...
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Cathy Caruth
#26605
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Cathy Caruth is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature. After graduating cum laude from Princeton University, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale. Before coming to Cornell, she taught at Yale, then Emory, where she developed an archive of Holocaust testimony, co-organized a national interdisciplinary conference on trauma, and significantly expanded the graduate program in Comparative Literature.
Go to Profile#1518
Philip Tew
#42450
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip Tew is the author of works on the contemporary British novel. His first novel Afterlives was published in February 2019. A second fiction book, Fragmentary Lives: Three Novellas, was published in October 2019.
Go to Profile#1519
Aharon Shabtai
#31148
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Aharon Shabtai is an Israeli poet and translator. Biography Aharon Shabtai studied Greek and philosophy in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne and at Cambridge, and he teaches literature in Tel Aviv University. He has published some 20 books of poetry in Hebrew, and English translations of his work have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the London Review of Books, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review.
Go to Profile#1520
Cary Nelson
#12651
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Cary Nelson , is an American professor emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the American Association of University Professors between 2006 and 2012.
Go to Profile#1521
Richard Wagner
#35702
Overall Influence
1952 - 2023 (71 years)
Richard Wagner was a Romanian-born German novelist. He published a number of short stories, novels and essays. Life and work Wagner was a member of one of Romania's German minorities, called Banat Swabians, like his wife, Herta Müller He studied German and Romanian literature at Timișoara University. He then worked as a German language school teacher and as a journalist, and published poetry and short stories in German. He was in 1972 a co-founder and member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a German-speaking literary activist society.
Go to Profile#1522
Glynne Wickham
#28127
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Glynne William Gladstone Wickham was a British Shakespearean and theatre scholar. Life Wickham was born in Cape Town, and was the great-grandson of William Ewart Gladstone. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. In 1941 he played the title role in Hamlet for the Oxford University Dramatic Society , directed by Nevill Coghill. In 1942–1946, interrupting his undergraduate studies, he served as a navigator in the RAF. He returned to New College in 1946, and became the first postwar president of OUDS. In 1948 Coghill chose him to direct a "complex" production of a masque t...
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Harold Brodkey
#27839
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Harold Brodkey , born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist. Life Brodkey was the second child born in Staunton, Illinois, to Max Weintraub and Celia Glazer Weintraub ; Samuel Weintraub was their oldest child. He was Jewish. When their birth mother Celia died, Samuel Weintraub was four and old enough to remain with his father but Aaron Weintraub, only two years old, was adopted by his father's cousin, Doris Rubenstein Brodkey and her husband, Joseph Brodkey and renamed Harold Roy Brodkey. Doris and Joseph lived in University City, Missouri, with their daughter, Marilyn Ruth Brodkey .
Go to Profile#1524
Marilyn Durham
#26536
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Marilyn Durham was an American author of fiction. Her best-known novel is her first, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, which was made into a film of the same name. Early life Durham was born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1930, to Russell and Stacy Birdsall Wall. Her father was an L&N blacksmith. Durham attended Evansville College for a year . She married Kilburn Durham, a field representative for Social Security, in November 1950, and settled into life as a wife and mother and self-described "frumpy housewife." The Durhams had two daughters, Elaine and Jennifer. Durham had a lifelong interest in t...
Go to Profile#1525
Cao Wenxuan
#37221
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cao Wenxuan is a Chinese novelist, best known for his works of children's literature. Cao is the vice president of the Beijing Writers Association. He is also a professor and doctoral tutor at Peking University. His novels have been translated into English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Serbian.
Go to Profile#1526
Kenneth MacMillan
#10652
Overall Influence
1929 - 1992 (63 years)
Sir Kenneth MacMillan was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992.
Go to Profile#1527
Shin Shifra
#34007
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Shin Shifra ; is the pen name of Shifra Shifman Shmuelevitch , a poet, translator, writer, editor and literary academic. Shifra won multiple literature awards. Biography Shin Shifra, the fifth of eight children, was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Bnei Brak, in a veteran Jerusalemite family. Her father was among the first new age Jewish teachers in The Land of Israel. She studied at the Talpiot high school gymnasium for girls in Tel Aviv, and graduated from the Levinsky Seminar for Teachers in Jaffa. In addition, she studied Kabbalah, Jewish philosophy, Hebrew literature, Sumerian and Akkadian....
Go to Profile#1528
Alan Gribben
#26230
Overall Influence
Alan Gribben is a professor emeritus of English at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama and a Mark Twain scholar. He was distinguished research professor from 1998 to 2001 and the Dr. Guinevera A. Nance Alumni Professor from 2006 to 2009. He engendered widespread controversy in 2011 when he announced the publication of expurgated versions of Twain's works.
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Catherine Clément
#11942
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. A member of the school of French feminism and écriture féminine, she has published books with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva.
Go to Profile#1530
Allen Grossman
#27232
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Allen R. Grossman was a noted American poet, critic and professor. Biography Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1932, Grossman was educated at Harvard University, graduating with an MA in 1956 after several interruptions. He went on to receive a PhD from Brandeis University in 1960, where he remained a professor until 1991. In 1991, he became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University where until 2005 he taught in the English Department, primarily focusing on poetry and poetics. He continued to write after his retirement from teaching.
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Lawrence D. Kritzman
#12000
Overall Influence
Lawrence D. Kritzman, an American scholar, is the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences, Edward Tuck Professor of French Language and Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He has previously held the Willard Professorship of French, Comparative Literature, and Oratory and the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professorship in the Humanities. He has written works on, edited works on, or given lectures on Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Sartre, Camus, Malraux, Derrida, Montaigne, de Beauvoir, and others, focusing especially on twentieth- and twenty-first century French philosophy and intellectual history.
Go to Profile#1532
Kate Millett
#19722
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics , which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a ...
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Julia Keller
#18645
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Julia Keller is an American writer and former journalist. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Life Keller was born in Huntington, West Virginia and lived there throughout her early life. Her father was a mathematics professor who taught at Marshall University. She graduated from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and earned a doctoral degree in English literature from Ohio State University. Her master's thesis was an analysis of the Henry Roth novel, Call It Sleep. Her doctoral dissertation explored multiple biographies of Virginia Woolf . She currently l...
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Josef Haslinger
#30745
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Josef Haslinger is an Austrian writer. Haslinger was born in Zwettl, Lower Austria. He studied philosophy, drama and Germanic studies at the University of Vienna. He received his PhD in 1980. Since then he has been working as a freelance writer. 1976 to 1992 he was co-editor of the literary magazine "Wespennest".
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Jonathan Dee
#30302
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jonathan Dee is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. His fifth novel, The Privileges, was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Early life Dee was born in New York City. He graduated from Yale University, where he studied fiction writing with John Hersey.
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Ocean Vuong
#29325
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. Vuong is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.
Go to Profile#1537
Hasrat Jaipuri
#13161
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Hasrat Jaipuri, born Iqbal Hussain was an Indian poet, who wrote in the Hindi and Urdu languages. He was also a renowned film lyricist in Hindi films, where he won the Filmfare Awards for Best Lyricist twice – in 1966 and then in 1972.
Go to Profile#1538
Maeve Binchy
#15583
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Anne Maeve Binchy Snell was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, columnist, and speaker. Her novels were characterised by a sympathetic and often humorous portrayal of small-town life in Ireland, and surprise endings. Her novels, which were translated into 37 languages, sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Her death at age 73, announced by Vincent Browne on Irish television late on 30 July 2012, was mourned as the death of one of Ireland's best-loved and most recognisable writers.
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
#28340
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and she was the recipient in 2021 of a United States Artists fellowship. She published her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, in 2021.
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John Cayley
#48141
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
John Howland Cayley is a Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media as well as a theorist of the practice, a poet, and a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University . Education After moving to the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, Cayley went to secondary school in the south of England. He read for a degree in Chinese Studies at Durham University, leaving with a 2:1 in 1978.
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Robert Antoni
#43726
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert Antoni is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys.
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Dagmar Reichardt
#17909
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Dagmar Reichardt is a leading German scholar in the area of transcultural studies. Life Dagmar Reichardt descends from a German Huguenot family with roots extending far back in time, the first documented Renaissance family crest of the Reichardt's being located in the cathedral St. Georg of Nördlingen, Bavaria, showing the then-mayor of Nördlingen Kilian Reichart as first ancestor. The House's later branches include German composer and music critic Johann Friedrich Reichardt , as its most prominent cultural representative who appeared in Königsberg, Halle and at the courts of three Prussian kings in Berlin and Potsdam.
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Claudia L. Johnson
#25843
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University; she is also currently chairperson of the English department. Johnson received her PhD from Princeton University; she specializes in Restoration and 18th century British literature, with an especial focus on the novel. She is also interested in feminist theory and gender studies. Johnson is renowned for her books on Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Richard F. Thomas
#41841
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard F. Thomas is the George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His scholarship has focused on various critical approaches, metrics and prose stylistics , genre studies, translation theory and practice, and the reception of Classical literature and culture, particularly with respect to Virgil.
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Denise Riley
#22126
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Denise Riley is an English poet and philosopher. Life Riley lives in London. She was educated for a year at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated from New Hall, Cambridge. She was, until recently, Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A. D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University.
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Marie-Laure Ryan
#33445
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent literary scholar and critic. She has written several books and articles on narratology, fiction, and cyberculture and has been awarded several times for her work. She attended the University of Geneva to study literature as an undergraduate, before moving to the United States in 1968. attending graduate school at the University of Utah, where she received her M.A. in Linguistics and German, alongside a Ph.D in French. She later obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of California San Diego.
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Meryn Cadell
#22874
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Meryn Cadell is an American-Canadian writer and performance artist. He is an assistant professor of song lyrics and libretto writing in the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia.
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Makoto Fukami
#35514
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Makoto Fukami is a Japanese manga artist, novelist, and screenwriter. He started writing manga in 1999 and since has had multiple of his series adapted into other media. In addition to manga, he also did screenwriting for Psycho-Pass and its first film Psycho-Pass: The Movie in 2012 and 2015 respectively, both of which have been well received.
Go to Profile#1549
Greg Sarris
#36154
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gregory Michael Sarris is the Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the current Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Until 2022, Sarris was the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Creative Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, where he taught classes in Native American Literature, American Literature, and Creative Writing. He is also President of the Graton Economic Development Authority.
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Jay Wright
#24475
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jay Wright is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what...
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