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,
#251
Lawrence Buell
#5731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Lawrence Ingalls Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism. He is the 2007 recipient of the Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary studies, the "highest professional award that the American Literature Section of the MLA can give." He won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism for his 2003 book on Ralph Waldo Emerson. His Writing for an Endangered World won the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies.
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Marcel Reich-Ranicki
#3918
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the informal literary association Gruppe 47. He was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst in Germany.
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Michael Hofmann
#4664
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English". Biography Hofmann was born in Freiburg into a family with a literary tradition. His father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. His maternal grandfather edited the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College, and then studied English Literature and Classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next ...
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Paul Muldoon
#3685
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he has been both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society and poetry editor at The New Yorker.
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Arnold Rampersad
#3975
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
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Donald Hall
#4360
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review , the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft.
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Sandra Gilbert
#5830
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sandra M. Gilbert is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic . Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
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Andrew Sullivan
#703
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. His newsletter The Weekly Dish was launched in July 2020.
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Allen Ginsberg
#2857
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
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Shelby Foote
#3541
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
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Frank McCourt
#3428
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Francis McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Early life and education Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. , of Toome, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who was aligned with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan from Limerick. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931;...
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Simin Daneshvar
#6215
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Simin Dāneshvar was an Iranian academic, novelist, fiction writer, and translator. She was largely regarded as the first major Iranian woman novelist. Her books dealt with the lives of ordinary Iranians, especially those of women, and through the lens of recent political and social events in Iran at the time. Daneshvar had a number of firsts to her credit; in 1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun , which went on to become a bestseller. Daneshvar's Playhouse, a collection of five sto...
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Jun Etō
#9069
Overall Influence
1932 - 1999 (67 years)
Jun Etō was the pen name of a Japanese literary critic, active in the Shōwa and early Heisei periods of Japan. His real name was Egashira Atsuo. Early life Etō was born in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo; his father was a banker, and his grandfather was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy. His mother died when he was four years old, and always sickly as a child, he was mostly educated at home. He had an interest in literature from an early age, ranging from the heavy works of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to the comics of Suihō Tagawa. In 1942, he was sent to boarding school in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture.
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Bei Dao
#7829
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bei Dao is the pen name of the Chinese-American writer Zhao Zhenkai . Among the most acclaimed Chinese-language poets of his generation, he is often regarded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to poetry, he is the author of short fiction, essays, and a memoir. Known as a dissident, he is a prominent representative of a school of poetry known variously in the West as "Misty" or "Obscure" Poetry.
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Julian Barnes
#3664
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh . In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
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Humphrey Carpenter
#5990
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society the Inklings.
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Anne Waldman
#5400
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.
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Colm Tóibín
#4937
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet. His first novel, The South, was published in 1990. The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards in the world. Nora Webster won the Hawthornden Prize, whilst The Magician won the Folio Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána and he won the "UK and Ireland Nobel" ...
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William Gaddis
#5511
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
William Thomas Gaddis Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place . The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
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Brian McHale
#5282
Overall Influence
Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
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Qian Zhongshu
#4892
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Qian Zhongshu , also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu or Dzien Tsoong-su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition. He is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged. His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He also played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life.
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Roberto Bolaño
#5859
Overall Influence
1953 - 2003 (50 years)
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages". The New York Times described him as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation".
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Sundarar
#4438
Overall Influence
Sundarar , also referred to as Chuntarar, Chuntaramurtti, Nampi Aruran or Tampiran Tolan, was an eighth-century poet-saint of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta tradition of Hinduism. He is among the Tevaram trio, and one of the most prominent Nayanars, the Shaiva bhakti poets of Tamil Nadu.
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August Wilson
#2656
Overall Influence
1945 - 2005 (60 years)
August Wilson was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called , which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson , both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone . In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
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Wendell Berry
#1292
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land and The Unsettling of America . His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth , Jayber Crow , and That Distant Land .
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Herta Müller
#3908
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf , Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
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Robert Bolt
#2794
Overall Influence
1924 - 1995 (71 years)
Robert Oxton Bolt was an English playwright and a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter, known for writing the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Man for All Seasons, the latter two of which won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Beverly Cleary
#6659
Overall Influence
1916 - 2021 (105 years)
Beverly Atlee Cleary was an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.
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Michael McClure
#2883
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Michael McClure was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.
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Ismail Kadare
#4062
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a leading international literary figure and intellectual. He focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
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Simon Armitage
#3353
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. He has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989. Many of his poems concern his home town in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including the Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.
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Jim Harrison
#4768
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
James Harrison was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He was a prolific and versatile writer publishing over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and memoir. He wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and published essays on food, travel, and sport. Harrison indicated that, of all his writing, his poetry meant the most to him.
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Robert Scholes
#6956
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Robert E. Scholes was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction. Education and career Robert Scholes was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. After taking his A.B. at Yale University in 1950, he served as a gunnery officer in the U. S. Navy from 1952-1955. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1959, and he taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Iowa, before joining the Brown faculty in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature in 1970. After his retirement from full-time teaching in 1999, Prof...
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Oksana Zabuzhko
#6850
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Oksana Stefanivna Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works have been translated into several languages. Life Born 19 September 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine. The writer's father, Stefan Ivanovych Zabuzhko was a teacher, literary critic, and translator, the first to translate the stories of the Czech composer and writer Ilja Hurník into Ukrainian, and was repressed during Stalin's regime.
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Walter Mosley
#5651
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
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Muriel Spark
#5293
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Life Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud . Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls , where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith. In 1934–35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a ...
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Robert Hass
#4671
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
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Janet Todd
#4872
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Janet Margaret Todd is a British academic and author. She was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. Much of her work concerns Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and their circles.
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José Emilio Pacheco
#5865
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
José Emilio Pacheco Berny was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Berlin International Literature Festival has praised him as "one of the most significant contemporary Latin American poets". In 2009 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize for his literary oeuvre.
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Linda Hutcheon
#5721
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, O.C. is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.
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Yves Bonnefoy
#3011
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Yves Jean Bonnefoy was a French poet and art historian. He also published a number of translations, most notably the plays of William Shakespeare which are considered among the best in French. He was professor at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1993 and is the author of several works on art, art history, and artists including Miró and Giacometti, and a monograph on Paris-based Iranian artist Farhad Ostovani. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that Bonnefoy was ″perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.″
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David Mirkin
#5203
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Mirkin is an American feature film and television director, writer and producer. Mirkin grew up in Philadelphia and intended to become an electrical engineer, but abandoned this career path in favor of studying film at Loyola Marymount University. After graduating, he became a stand-up comedian, and then moved into television writing. He wrote for the sitcoms Three's Company, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show and served as showrunner on the series Newhart. After an unsuccessful attempt to remake the British series The Young Ones, Mirkin created Get a Life in 1990. T...
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Leo Marx
#4785
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Leo Marx was an American historian, literary critic, and educator. He was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his works in the field of American studies. Marx studied the relationship between technology and culture in 19th and 20th century America.
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Alan Garner
#6033
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Alan Garner is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
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Louis Menand
#2598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club , an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
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Marjorie Perloff
#4538
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States. Early life Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exacerbated Viennese anti-Semitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York. After attending Oberlin College from 1949 to 1952, she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1953; that year, she married Joseph K. Perloff, a cardiologist focused on congenital heart disease.
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Georges Poulet
#8703
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Georges Poulet was a Belgian literary critic associated with the Geneva School. Best known for his four-volume work Studies in Human Time, Poulet rejected formalist approaches to literary criticism and advanced the theory that criticism requires the reader to open his or her mind to the consciousness of the author. His work has had a lasting influence on critics such as J. Hillis Miller.
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Ed Burns
#5517
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Edward P. Burns is an American screenwriter and television producer. He has worked closely with writing partner David Simon. For HBO, they have collaborated on The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, The Plot Against America, and We Own This City. Burns is a former Baltimore police detective for the homicide and narcotics divisions, and a public school teacher. He often draws upon these experiences for his writing.
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Mary Oliver
#7532
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
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Denise Levertov
#3901
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an "enemy alien" by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistak...
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