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,
#1901
Susan Straight
#31475
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Susan Straight is an American writer. She was a National Book Award finalist for the novel Highwire Moon in 2001. Biography Susan Straight attended John W. North High School in Riverside, California and took classes at Riverside Community College while in high school. She went on to earn a scholarship to the University of Southern California and, in 1984, earned her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. She co-founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts program at University of California, Riverside, ...
Go to Profile#1902
Robert W. Thomson
#22556
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Robert William Thomson was Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at Oxford University. Thomson graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in classics, then studied at the Halki seminary in Turkey. Thomson received his PhD from Cambridge after defending his doctoral dissertation on Armenian and Syriac versions of Athanasius of Alexandria's works.
Go to Profile#1903
Paul Hoover
#43878
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Paul Hoover is an American poet and editor born in Harrisonburg, Virginia. His work has been associated with innovative practices such as; New York School and language poetry. After many years as poet in residence at Columbia College Chicago, he accepted the position of Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University in 2003. He lives in Mill Valley, California.
Go to Profile#1904
Lee Smith
#28994
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Go to Profile#1905
Andre Dubus III
#35292
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Andre Dubus III is an American novelist and short story writer. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Early life and education Born in Oceanside, California, to Patricia and Louisiana-born writer Andre Dubus, Dubus grew up in mill towns in the Merrimack River valley along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border with his three siblings: Suzanne, Jeb, and Nicole. His father left his mother for one of his students, leaving his mother to support the family alone, under straitened financial circumstances.
Go to Profile#1906
Jesmyn Ward
#29379
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and a professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones and won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She also received a 2012 Alex Award for the story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. All of Ward's first three novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.
Go to Profile#1907
Philip Thody
#22720
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Philip Malcolm Waller Thody was an English scholar of French literature who was Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds from 1965 until 1993. Early life and education Thody was born in Lincoln in 1928 and educated locally. After national service in the RAF, he read French at King's College London and subsequently lived in Paris for three years, writing a thesis on 'The Vogue of the American Novel in France since 1944', including a year as a lecteur at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#1908
Antanas Vaičiulaitis
#53281
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Antanas Augustinas Vaičiulaitis was a Lithuanian fiction writer of the 20th century, and also known for his literary criticism and translations. His most prominent work is the novel Valentina. Biography Antanas Vaičiulaitis was born on June 23, 1906, in Didieji Šelviai, near Vilkaviškis, in the Suvalkija region, then part of Congress Poland. He attended a primary school in Vilkaviškis, and from 1919 to 1927, he attended Žiburys High School, also in Vilkaviškis. His poetry was first published in 1925 in the journal Krivulė. In 1927, he enrolled at the University of Lithuania in Kaunas, where he studied Lithuanian and French languages and literature.
Go to Profile#1909
Jane Hirshfield
#30676
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen language...
Go to Profile#1910
Peter Handke
#35581
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Handke is considered to be one of the most influential and original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#1911
A. R. Ammons
#28095
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Archibald Randolph Ammons was an American poet and professor of English at Cornell University. Ammons published nearly thirty collections of poems in his lifetime. Revered for his impact on American romantic poetry, Ammons received several major awards for his work, including two National Book Awards for Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems and another in 1993 for Garbage.
Go to Profile#1912
Ainehi Edoro
#43609
Overall Influence
Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian writer, critic and academic. She is the founder and publisher of the African literary blog Brittle Paper. She is currently an assistant professor of Global Black Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research include 21st-century fiction, literature in digital/social media, The Global Anglophone Novel, African Literature, Contemporary British Fiction, Novel Theory, Political Philosophy, and Digital Humanities.
Go to Profile#1913
Tatyana Kasatkina
#49680
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kasatkina is a Russian philosopher, philologist, culture expert, religious scholar and writer. She is an expert in the field of theory of culture, theory of literature, philosophy, religious studies, the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Russian literature of the 19th-21st centuries. She is Doctor of Philology , Head Researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, Head of the Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture” at the Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, president of the Research Committee for Dostoyevsky's Artistic Heritage within the Scientific Council for the History of World Culture, RAS.
Go to Profile#1914
D. W. Robertson Jr.
#44593
Overall Influence
1914 - 1992 (78 years)
Durant Waite Robertson Jr. was a scholar of medieval English literature and especially Geoffrey Chaucer. He taught at Princeton University from 1946 until his retirement in 1980 as the Murray Professor of English, and was "widely regarded as this [the twentieth] century's most influential Chaucer scholar".
Go to Profile#1915
Liam Rector
#49703
Overall Influence
1949 - 2007 (58 years)
Liam Rector was an American poet, essayist and educator. He had administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs , the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He was also the founder of the graduate Writing Seminars program at Bennington College.
Go to Profile#1916
Mati Unt
#43329
Overall Influence
1944 - 2005 (61 years)
Mati Unt was an Estonian writer, essayist and theatre director. Biography His first novel, written at the age of 18 after having finished high school, was Hüvasti, kollane kass . He completed his education in literature, journalism and philology at the University of Tartu. After that, he served as Director of the Vanemuine Theater from 1966 to 1972, held the same position at the Youth Theater until 1991, and then at the Estonian Drama Theatre until 2003, when he became a freelance writer.
Go to Profile#1917
Ulla-Lena Lundberg
#20811
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ulla-Lena Lundberg is a Finland-Swedish author living in Porvoo, Finland. Her Swedish-language books have been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, German, Russian and Dutch.
Go to Profile#1918
Frank Lentricchia
#37390
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Frank Lentricchia is an American literary critic, novelist, and film teacher. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Duke University in 1966 and 1963 respectively after receiving a B.A. from Utica College in 1962. Lentricchia retired from Duke University, where he was a professor in the Program in Literature.
Go to Profile#1919
Frank Conroy
#39238
Overall Influence
1936 - 2005 (69 years)
Frank Conroy was an American author. He published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this ultimately made Conroy a noted figure in the literary world. The book was nominated for the National Book Award.
Go to Profile#1920
Alice Fulton
#13337
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alice Fulton is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Emerita at Cornell University. Her awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#1921
Yuri Nagibin
#22746
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Yuri Markovich Nagibin was a Soviet and Russian writer, screenwriter and novelist. Biography Yuri Nagibin was born in Moscow. Nagibin's mother Ksenia Nagibina was pregnant with him when his father — Kirill Nagibin, a Russian nobleman — was executed as a counter-revolutionary before he was born. He was raised by his Jewish stepfather Mark Leventhal who was also later arrested and sent into internal exile to the Russian North in Komi Republic in 1927. Nagibin was unaware of his real father, so he assumed he was partly Jewish . He found out late in life that both of his parents were in fact Russ...
Go to Profile#1922
Jane Tompkins
#44180
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jane Tompkins is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism. She has also coined and developed the notion of cultural work in literary studies and contributed to the new historicist form of literary criticism that emerged in the 1980s. She earned her PhD at Yale in 1966 and subsequently taught at Temple University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is married to cultural critic Stanley Fish.
Go to Profile#1923
Bill Ransom
#21125
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bill Ransom is a science fiction writer . Early life and education He began full-time employment at the age of eleven as an agricultural worker. He attended Washington State University on track and boxing scholarships, and the University of Puget Sound on a track scholarship. He received his BA in Sociology and English Education from the University of Washington in 1970, and MA in English from Utah State University in 1997.
Go to Profile#1924
Masashi Kishimoto
#25505
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Masashi Kishimoto is a Japanese manga artist. His manga series, Naruto, which was in serialization from 1999 to 2014, has sold over 250 million copies worldwide in 46 countries as of May 2019. The series has been adapted into two anime and multiple films, video games, and related media. Besides the Naruto manga, Kishimoto also personally supervised the two canonical anime films, The Last: Naruto the Movie and Boruto: Naruto the Movie, and has written several one-shot stories. In 2019, Kishimoto wrote Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru which ended in March 2020. From May 2016 through October 2020...
Go to Profile#1925
Zachary Leader
#42612
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in English in 1977. Although born and raised in the U.S. he has lived for over forty years in the U.K., and has dual British and American citizenship. His best-known works are The Letters of Kingsley Amis , The Life of Kingsley Amis , a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 , which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the U.K.
Go to Profile#1926
Elliot Tiber
#13835
Overall Influence
1935 - 2016 (81 years)
Elliot Michael Tiber was an artist, professor, and screenwriter who wrote a memoir about the Woodstock Festival held in Bethel, New York in 1969. He claimed responsibility for the relocation of the festival after a permit for it was withdrawn by the zoning board of a nearby town.
Go to Profile#1927
Makoto Ōoka
#34838
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Makoto Ōoka was a Japanese poet and literary critic. He pioneered the collaborative poetic form renshi in the 1990s, in which he has collaborated with such well-known literary figures as Charles Tomlinson, James Lasdun, Joseph Stanton, Shuntarō Tanikawa and Mikirō Sasaki.
Go to Profile#1928
Esther Kinsky
#34593
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Esther Kinsky is a German literary translator and the author of novels and poetry. Life and works Esther Kinsky grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia and read Slavonic studies at Bonn. She works as a literary translator from the Polish, English and Russian languages into German and as the author of prose and poetry. After spending some years in London, she settled in Berlin.
Go to Profile#1929
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
#39300
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
Go to Profile#1930
Elémire Zolla
#25597
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Elémire Zolla was an Italian essayist, philosopher and historian of religion. He was a connoisseur of esoteric doctrines and a scholar of Eastern and Western mysticism. Biography Zolla was born in Turin to a cosmopolitan family. His father was the painter Venanzio Zolla , born in England of Lombard father and an Alsatian mother. His mother was Blanche Smith a British musician, originally of Kent. Zolla spent his childhood between Paris, London, and Turin, speaking English, French, and Italian, while studying German and Spanish.
Go to Profile#1931
Joachim Küpper
#33223
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joachim Küpper is a professor of romance studies and comparative literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. Küpper has published on authors from various periods, including Homer, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac, Flaubert, Theodor Fontane, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition, he works on problems of literary theory and intellectual history. He is the author of eight monographs and approximately 100 articles, as well as the editor of numerous volumes and scholarly journals.
Go to Profile#1932
Gero von Wilpert
#55714
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Gero von Wilpert was a German author, a senior lecturer in German at the University of New South Wales and, from 1980, Professor of German at the University of Sydney. Life and career Wilpert was born in Tartu , Estonia. Like all Baltic Germans, he was forced to leave Estonia after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the takeover of the country by the Soviet Union .
Go to Profile#1933
Robert F. Goheen
#15607
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Robert Francis Goheen was an American academic, president of Princeton University and United States Ambassador to India. Biography Robert Francis Goheen was born on August 15, 1919, to Anne and Dr Robert H. H. Goheen in Vengurla, India, where both his parents were serving as Presbyterian medical missionaries. His early education through the tenth grade was at Kodaikanal International School in India. After moving to the United States in 1934, he completed his secondary school education at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1936. He then attended Princeton University, where he won the Moses Taylor Pyne Prize and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B.
Go to Profile#1934
Thomas Stearns Eliot
#75507
Overall Influence
#1935
Jacques Lecoq
#13183
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Jacques Lecoq was a French stage actor and acting movement coach. He was best known for his teaching methods in physical theatre, movement, and mime which he taught at the school he founded in Paris known as École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. He taught there from 1956 until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1999.
Go to Profile#1936
Penina Muhando
#21999
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Penina Muhando, also known as Penina Mlama , is a Tanzanian Kiswahili playwright, a theorist and practitioner of Theatre for Development in Tanzania. Life and literary career Muhando was born in Berega, Morogoro Region in Tanzania in 1948. She gained a BA in theatre arts, a BA in education, and a PhD in language and linguistics from the University of Dar es Salaam.
Go to Profile#1937
Poul Erik Tøjner
#52718
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Poul Erik Tøjner is a Danish museum director and art critic. Since 2000 he has been director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Biography Tøjner studied philosophy and Nordic philology at the University of Copenhagen, getting his master's degree in 1987 and a licentiate degree in 1991 with a dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard. He has been a literary and art critic first at national Danish newspaper Kristligt Dagblad from 1984 to 1987, Dagbladet Information from 1987 to 1989 and Weekendavisen from 1989 to 2000, where he served both as a cultural editor and from 1997 to 2000 was also as a member of the Editors-in-Chief.
Go to Profile#1938
Jeph Loeb
#24988
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Joseph "Jeph" Loeb III is an American film and television writer, producer and comic book writer. Loeb was a producer/writer on the TV series Smallville and Lost, writer for the films Commando and Teen Wolf, and a writer and co-executive producer on the NBC TV show Heroes from its premiere in 2006 to November 2008. From 2010 to 2019, Loeb was the Head of and Executive Vice President of Marvel Television.
Go to Profile#1939
Kimberly M. Blaeser
#59219
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kimberly M. Blaeser is a Native American poet and writer enrolled in the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She was the Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015–16. Background Kimberly Blaeser was born in 1955 in Billings, Montana. Being of German and Anishinaabe Heritage, she grew up the White Earth reservation. In 2024 she will take up an appointment as the Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College.
Go to Profile#1940
Jin Kemu
#35499
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Jin Kemu is a Chinese poet, scholar, translator and essay writer, professor of Beijing University. In 1935 he started to write poems and novels. In his early years he had different careers as a librarian, newspaper editor and English teacher. In 1941 he went to India, studied ancient Indian literature, Buddhism, philosophy and returned China in 1946. At the time he was one of few scholars in China who knew Sanskrit and Pali language.
Go to Profile#1941
Ilya Kaminsky
#40127
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Ilya Kaminsky is a USSR-born, Ukrainian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odesa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
Go to Profile#1942
Benjamin Percy
#35669
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Benjamin Percy is an American author of novels and short stories, essayist, comic book writer, and screenwriter. Career Benjamin Percy has published four novels, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, as well as two books of short fiction: Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. In 2016, he published his first book of non-fiction, a collection of essays on writing and genre fiction: Thrill Me.
Go to Profile#1943
Egon Wolff
#15119
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Egon Wolff was a Chilean playwright and author. Born in Santiago, he was educated in Chile and the United States. Early life Egon Wolff was born into a middle-class family of German immigrants, to parents who espoused traditional family values and encouraged traditional work ethics. During his childhood Wolff suffered periods of ill health and turned to reading; he read the classics of world literature to escape the boredom of being sick and bedridden. At the age of 16 Wolff produced his first novel, El Ocaso .
Go to Profile#1944
Doris Sommer
#46519
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Doris Sommer is a literature scholar. She is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard. Sommer received her PhD from Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#1945
Albert Brooks
#27703
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Albert Brooks is an American actor, comedian, director and screenwriter. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for 1987's Broadcast News and was widely praised for his performance in the 2011 action drama film Drive. Brooks has also acted in films such as Taxi Driver , Private Benjamin , Unfaithfully Yours , and My First Mister . He has written, directed, and starred in several comedy films, such as Modern Romance , Lost in America , and Defending Your Life . He is also the author of 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America .
Go to Profile#1946
Jason Starr
#43183
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jason Starr is an American author, comic book writer, and screenwriter from New York City. Starr has written numerous crime fiction novels and thrillers. Starr's Tough Luck, a novel published in 2003, was a Barry Award Winner for Best Paperback Original and was a nominee at the 2004 Anthony Awardss for Best Paperback Original. Twisted City won the award for Best Paperback Original at the 2005 Anthony Awards. Furthermore, in 2011, The Chill won the first ever Anthony Award for Best Graphic Novel.
Go to Profile#1947
Curt Leviant
#49970
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Curt Leviant is a retired Jewish Studies professor, as well as a novelist and translator. Personal life and career His parents were Jacques and Fenia Leviant. They spoke Yiddish at home, and encouraged their son's interest in Yiddish literature and theater.
Go to Profile#1948
Silvian Iosifescu
#51070
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Silvian Iosifescu was a literary critic, educator, translator and Romanian literature professor at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest. He was head of literary theory at the university. Iosifescu was born to Tonya and Pincu Iosifescu, a family of Sephardic Jews. He joined the Romanian Communist Party while it was still underground. He worked for "Cuvantul Liber", an antifascist publication. He contributed in particular to critical editions of works by Ion Luca Caragiale and wrote about the creations of this classic Romanian writer , and translated some of Caragiale's writings into French.
Go to Profile#1949
James Herriot
#12074
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
James Alfred Wight , better known by his pen name James Herriot, was a British veterinary surgeon and author. Born in Sunderland, Wight graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939, returning to England to become a veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire, where he practised for almost 50 years. He is best known for writing a series of eight books set in the 1930s–1950s Yorkshire Dales about veterinary practice, animals, and their owners, which began with If Only They Could Talk, first published in 1970. Over the decades, the series of books has sold some 60 million copies.
Go to Profile#1950
Brad Leithauser
#21858
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Brad E. Leithauser is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he is now on faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
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