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,
#1551
Hartmut Erbse
#30027
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Hartmut Erbse was a German classical philologist. Life The son of a dentist from Thüringen, Erbse studied classical philology in Hamburg, where he was well known for his lively hat-wear and received his doctorate in 1940. In 1948 he completed his habilitation at Graz with a study of Attic lexica; in the same year he received his first lectureship, in Hamburg. In 1954 he was appointed to a special professorship there, and six years later he was appointed a full professor. In 1965 he accepted an invitation to take the chair of Greek philology at Tübingen, and in 1968 a further invitation to the University of Bonn.
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Medbh McGuckian
#23724
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland. Biography She was born the third of six children as Maeve McCaughan to Hugh and Margaret McCaughan in North Belfast. Her father was a school headmaster and her mother an influential art and music enthusiast. She was educated at Holy Family Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree in 1974 at Queen's University Belfast. Maeve McCaughan adopted the Irish spelling of her name, Medbh, when her university teacher, Seamus Heaney, wrote her name that way when signing books to her.
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Willy Maley
#28746
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
William Timothy "Willy" Maley is a Scottish literary critic, editor, teacher and writer. Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the English Association , and founder, with Philip Hobsbaum, of Glasgow's Creative Writing programme. He is a prolific author on subjects including early modern English literature from Spenser to Milton, and on modern Scottish and Irish writing.
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Honor Moore
#42082
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
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Rafiq Azad
#25574
Overall Influence
1943 - 2016 (73 years)
Rafiq Azad was a Bangladeshi poet, editor and writer. He is credited with 45 collections of poetry including Prakriti O Premer Kabita, Asambhaber Paye, Sahasra Sundar, Haturir Nichae Jiban, Khub Beshi Durea Noy, Khamakaro Bahaman Hey Udar Amiyo Batas and others. He is most well known for his poem "Bhaat De Haramjada" which was written during the famine of 1974. The poet participated in the war against the Pakistani occupation forces in 1971 Liberation War and was awarded ‘Notable Freedom Fighter Award” in 1997. He received Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1984 and national award Ekushey Pada...
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Tymoteusz Karpowicz
#43399
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Tymoteusz Karpowicz was a leading Polish language poet and playwright. Biography Born in the village of Zielona, near Vilnius, Karpowicz lived there until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Karpowicz debuted as a journalist in 1941 under the pseudonym Tadeusz Lirmian for the Vilnius-based newspaper Prawda Wileńska. During the Nazi occupation of Lithuania he was a member of the Polish Resistance. When the war came to an end in 1945, Karpowicz was resettled to Szczecin where he worked for Polish Radio. It was here Karpowicz published his first prose piece titled Legendy pomorskie .
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Núria Perpinyà
#46013
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Núria Perpinyà Filella is a Catalan novelist, a playwright and an essayist. Senior Lecturer in Theory and Comparative Literature at the university of Lleida in Catalonia, Spain. Her novels deal with unusual topics and are characterized by their intellectual irony, formal rigor and experimentalism. In her books, she defends the philosophy of Perspectivism and reflects on the fact that the phenomena have multiple interpretations. Her creative work is written in Catalan, but most of the essays are published in Spanish or in English.
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Anthony C. Yu
#30779
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Anthony Christopher Yu was an American literary theorist, sinologist, and theologian. He was a scholar of literature and religion, both East Asian and Western; and was the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Chicago Divinity School; as well as a member of the Departments of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and English Language and Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Yu has published widely in the fields of religion and compa...
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Suzanne Jill Levine
#31794
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Suzanne Jill Levine is an American writer, poet, literary translator and scholar. Levine was born in New York City where she studied piano at Juilliard and went to Music & Art High School. She earned a BA at Vassar College in 1967, an MA at Columbia University in 1969, and a PhD at New York University in 1977. A scholar of Latin American literature, her books include one of the first studies of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Adolfo Bioy Casares, both published in Spanish. She is also a leading specialist in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. Her 1991 b...
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Madeleine Gagnon
#30300
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Madeleine Gagnon is a Quebec educator, literary critic and writer. Biography She was born in Amqui in the valley of the Matapedia River and was educated at the Collège Notre-Dame d'Acadie in Moncton, at the Université de Montréal and the Université d'Aix-en-Provence. From 1969 to 1982, she taught literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She later served as a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the Université de Montréal, at the Université de Sherbrooke, at the Université du Québec à Montréal and at the Université du Québec à Rimouski.
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Boris Uspenskij
#24689
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Boris Andreevich Uspenskij is a Russian linguist, philologist, semiotician, historian of culture. Biography Uspenskij graduated from Moscow University in 1960. He delivered lectures in Moscow until 1982, but later moved on to work in Harvard University, Cornell University, Vienna University, and the University of Graz. Full professor of Russian literature at the Naples Eastern University, he was elected to many scholarly societies and academies of Europe.
Go to Profile#1562
David Plante
#23639
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
David Robert Plante is an American novelist, diarist, and memoirist of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent. Life The son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante, Plante is of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent. He graduated from Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He taught creative writing at Columbia University before retiring. His diary is kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. His papers are kept in the library of The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Plante lives in London, Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece. He has ...
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Alan Cheuse
#37282
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Alan Stuart Cheuse was an American writer, editor, professor of literature, and radio commentator. A longtime NPR book commentator, he was also the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and novellas, a memoir and a collection of travel essays. In addition, Cheuse was a regular contributor to All Things Considered. His short fiction appeared in respected publications like The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, among other places. He taught in the Writing Program at George Mason University and the Community of Writers.
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Ágnes Gergely
#40584
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ágnes Gergely is a Hungarian writer, educator, journalist and translator. Biography She was born Ágnes Guttmann in family of Fenákel Rózsika and György Guttmann in Endrőd, a village on the Great Hungarian Plain. She took her pen name "Gergely" from the novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by the Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi because Agnes Gergely wished to be courageous like the hero from the story, Gergely Bornemissza.
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Jim Lee
#18433
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jim Lee is a Korean American comic-book artist, writer, editor, and publisher. He is currently the President, Publisher and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics. In recognition of his work, Lee has received a Harvey Award, Inkpot Award and three Wizard Fan Awards.
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Eduardo Mendoza Garriga
#33549
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eduardo Mendoza Garriga is a Spanish novelist. Early life Garriga studied law in the first half of the 1960s and lived in New York City between 1973 and 1982, working as interpreter for the United Nations, and then tried to become a lawyer and then he realized that he wanted to be a writer. He maintained an intense relationship with novelists Juan Benet and Juan García Hortelano, poet Pere Gimferrer and writer Félix de Azúa. He currently lives in London.
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Anne Fadiman
#12598
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Anne Fadiman is an American essayist and reporter. Her interests include literary journalism, essays, memoir, and autobiography. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award.
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Aram Saroyan
#22535
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght" and a one-letter poem comprising a four-legged version of the letter "m".
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Steven Shaviro
#7637
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher, and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a B.A. in English in 1975, M.A. in English in 1978, and a Ph.D. in English in 1981, all from Yale University. From 1984 to 2004, he was a professor of English at the University of Washington, and since 2004 teaches film, culture and English at Wayne State University, where he is the DeRoy Professor of English.
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Bernard MacLaverty
#31254
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish fiction writer and novelist. His novels include Cal and Grace Notes. He has written five books of short stories. Biography MacLaverty was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at Holy Family Primary School in the Duncairn district and then at St Malachy's College. After school, he worked as a medical laboratory technician and studied at Queen's University Belfast. He lived in Belfast until 1975, when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children . He initially lived in Edinburgh and then the Isle of Islay before settling in the West E...
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Allen Mandelbaum
#31525
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Allen Mandelbaum was an American professor of literature and the humanities, poet, and translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian. His translations of classic works gained him numerous awards in Italy and the United States.
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Claire Vaye Watkins
#18322
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic. Her book of short stories Battleborn , won The Story Prize, among other awards. In 2012 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. Of her parents' influence on her award-winning collection, Watkins has said, “My father’s story is more in the collective subconscious but my mom’s is closer to the project.” In 2014 Watkins was the recipient of the Guggenheim Award.
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Marco Santagata
#51476
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Marco Santagata was an Italian academic, writer, and literary critic. Biography Santagata studied classical literature at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he graduated in 1970. He became a professor of literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice before returning to his alma mater, the University of Pisa, in 1984 as a professor of philology, literature, and linguistics. He was one of the most important Italian specialists of Dante Alighieri and Petrarch.
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Jun'ichi Yoda
#40942
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
was a Japanese poet and a leading figure among Japanese authors of children's books during the Shōwa period. Early life Junichi Yoda was born in 1905 in Setaka , Fukuoka, the second son of Yotarō Asayama and Sue, and was adopted as the heir of the Yodas, relatives of the Asayamas.
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Eloisa James
#36118
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly . She is a tenured Shakespeare professor at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novels under her pen name. Her novels are published in 30 countries and have sold approximately 7 million copies worldwide. She also wrote a bestselling memoir about the year her family spent in France, Paris in Love.
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Junichi Watanabe
#23215
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Jun'ichi Watanabe was a Japanese writer. Biography Jun'ichi Watanabe was born in Kamisunagawa, Hokkaido, Japan. His starting point as a literate was the death of a classmate who was his first love in high school. He published his first works while still studying at Sapporo Medical University, where he graduated in 1958. He specialised in orthopedic surgery, while at the same time writing medical, historical, and biographical novels. Following the scandal about the first heart transplant operation performed in Japan in 1968, which became known as the "Wada incident", Watanabe left his medical p...
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Ernst Badian
#24242
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Ernst Badian was an Austrian-born classical scholar who served as a professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1998. Early life and education Badian was born in Vienna in 1925 and in 1938 fled the Nazis with his family to New Zealand. There he attended the University of Canterbury, Christchurch , where he met his future wife Nathlie Ann Wimsett. He received a BA in 1945 and an MA the following year.
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Randel Helms
#40583
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Randel McCraw Helms, also known as Loyce Helms is an American professor of English literature, a writer on J. R. R. Tolkien and critical writer on the Bible. Biography Helms studied at University of California, Riverside, B.A. 1964, University of Washington, Ph.D. 1968, then taught from 1968 at the University of California as assistant professor of English, before becoming professor at the Department of English, Arizona State University. In 2007 he established the Randel and Susan McCraw Helms Homecoming Writing Contest for undergraduate students.
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Artine Artinian
#25470
Overall Influence
1907 - 2005 (98 years)
Artine Artinian was a distinguished French literature scholar of Armenian descent, notable for his valuable collection of French literary manuscripts and artwork. He was immortalized as a fictional character by his Bard colleague Mary McCarthy in the novel The Groves of Academe and by his friend Gore Vidal in the play The Best Man .
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U. A. Fanthorpe
#27634
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Ursula Askham Fanthorpe CBE FRSL was an English poet, who published as U. A. Fanthorpe. Her poetry comments mainly on social issues. Life and work Early years and education Born in south-east London, Fanthorpe was the daughter of a judge, or as she put it "middle-class but honest parents". She was educated at St Catherine's School, Bramley, in Surrey, and at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she "came to life", receiving a first-class degree in English language and literature.
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Lane Smith
#28972
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Lane Smith is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He is the Kate Greenaway medalist known for his eclectic visuals and subject matter, both humorous and earnest, such as the contemplative Grandpa Green, which received a Caldecott Honor in 2012, and the outlandish Stinky Cheese Man, which received a Caldecott Honor in 1992.
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Erin Entrada Kelly
#52422
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Erin Entrada Kelly is an American writer of children's literature. She was awarded the 2018 John Newbery Medal by the Association for Library Service to Children for her third novel, Hello, Universe.
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Jason Herbison
#26634
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Jason Herbison is an Australian television producer, screenwriter and novelist, most recently serving as the executive producer of the soap opera Neighbours. He has written scripts for numerous television serials, and has published several novels.
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Elaine May
#23514
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elaine Iva May is an American comedian, filmmaker, playwright, and actress. She first gained fame in the 1950s for her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols, before transitioning her career regularly breaking the mold as a writer and director of several critically acclaimed films. She has received numerous awards, including a BAFTA Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. She was honored with the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2022.
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Tahsin Yücel
#50947
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Tahsin Yücel was a Turkish translator, novelist, essayist and literary critic. Born in Elbistan, Yücel studied at the Istanbul University, graduating in French philology. After completing his postgraduate studies, in 1978 he became professor in the same university. In addition to being author of essays, novels and short stories, Yücel was mainly active as a translator of about 70 novels from French into Turkish.
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Seth Benardete
#8950
Overall Influence
1930 - 2001 (71 years)
Seth Benardete was an American classicist and philosopher, long a member of the faculties of New York University and The New School. In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.
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Toi Derricotte
#32827
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Toi Derricotte is an American poet. She is the author of six poetry collections and a literary memoir. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. From 2012–2017, Derricotte served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a professor emerita in writing at the University of Pittsburgh .
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Claude Vigée
#15411
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Claude Vigée was a French poet who wrote in French and Alsatian. He described himself as a "Jew and an Alsatian, thus doubly Alsatian and doubly Jewish". Life Vigée was born in Bischwiller, Bas-Rhin, the son of Germaine , a homemaker, and Robert Schwartz, who worked in business. He was descended from an old family of Alsatian cloth merchants. He spent his youth in Bischwiller, then attended secondary school in Strasbourg. Displaced from Alsace by the invasion of the Germans in 1940, he began to study medicine in Toulouse before joining the Résistance. In 1942, he published his first poems in the underground magazine "Poésie 42".
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Tan Onuma
#46023
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Tan Onuma was a noted Japanese author. Onuma received his degree in English literature from Waseda University in 1942, and in 1958 became a Waseda professor in the Faculty of Letters. He received the 1969 Yomiuri Prize for Kaichūdokei and in 1989 was named a member of the Japan Art Academy.
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Leonard Michaels
#35004
Overall Influence
1933 - 2003 (70 years)
Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Michaels was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He attended New York University and was awarded a BA degree, and then went on to earn an MA and PhD in English literature from the University of Michigan. After receiving his doctorate, Leonard Michaels moved to Berkeley, California, where he was to spend most of his adult life and become Professor of English at the University of Califor...
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Catherine Belsey
#26892
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Catherine Belsey was a British literary critic and academic. Early life Belsey was born in Salisbury and attended Godolphin and Latymer School in London. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and subsequently as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick.
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Ulrich Horstmann
#32299
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ulrich Horstmann is a German literary scholar and writer, who has also written under the pseudonym Klaus Steintal. Life Ulrich Horstmann finished his studies of English and Philosophy in 1974 with a doctoral thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. He was a lecturer at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. After habilitation in 1983 he lectured at the University of Münster until 1987. Since 1991 he has been a professor of English and American literature at the University of Giessen. He lives in Marburg.
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Lionel Casson
#33950
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Lionel Casson was a classicist, professor emeritus at New York University, and a specialist in maritime history. He earned his B.A. in 1934 at New York University, and in 1936 became an assistant professor. He later earned his Ph.D. there during 1939. In 2005 he was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal.
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Barrie Keeffe
#29355
Overall Influence
1945 - 2019 (74 years)
Barrie Colin Keeffe was an English dramatist and screenwriter. Best known for his screenplay for the gangster classic The Long Good Friday , starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, Keeffe demonstrated an interest in a variety of social and political issues, including disaffected youth and criminality.
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Jack Hirschman
#21131
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jack Hirschman was an American poet and social activist who wrote more than 100 volumes of poetry and essays. Biography Hirschman was born in New York City to a Russian Jewish family. He received a B.A. from the City College of New York in 1955 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. While attending City College, he worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press. When he was 19, he sent a story to Ernest Hemingway, who responded: "I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere wit...
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Suehiro Tanemura
#34745
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Suehiro Tanemura was a translator and critic. Tanemura was born in Toshima, Tokyo in 1933. His mother died in 1946. He became interested in German while still a teenager, and entered the University of Tokyo in 1951. He first majored in aesthetics but switched to German literature, graduating in 1957 and for a short time thereafter working in Kōbunsha in editing the women's magazine Josei Jishin.
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Rosanna Warren
#28632
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rosanna Phelps Warren is an American poet and scholar. Biography Warren is the daughter of poet, novelist, literary critic and Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren and writer Eleanor Clark. She graduated from Yale University, where she was a member of Manuscript Society, in 1976, with a degree in painting, and then in 1980 received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Until July 2012 she was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and a University Professor at Boston University.
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Kevin Killian
#50409
Overall Influence
1952 - 2019 (67 years)
Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright primarily of LGBT literature. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.
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Henry Bond
#13821
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Henry Bond, FHEA is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene , Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics. In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organised the art exhibition East Country Yard Show, which was influential in the formation and development of the Young British Artists movement; together with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, and Liam Gillick, the two were "the earliest of the YBAs."
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Paul Bowles
#28538
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.
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