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,
#2951
Bernard Mayes
#21514
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Anthony Bernard Duncan Mayes was a British broadcaster, university dean and author who founded one of America's first suicide prevention hotline. Biography Born in London, Mayes was educated at University College School. After studying classical civilizations at Downing College, Cambridge, he worked first as a school teacher of Latin, Greek and history. He was then ordained as an Anglican priest. Mayes emigrated to the United States in 1958 and became an Episcopal worker-priest and director of a student house attached to Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and New York University. He then moved to the Diocese of California where he held a parish near San Francisco.
Go to Profile#2952
Pedro Grases
#90314
Overall Influence
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Pedro Grases was a Venezuelan writer, historian and literary critic. He won the National Prize for Literature in 1993. See also Literature of Venezuela
Go to Profile#2953
Matthew Vaughn
#42428
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Matthew Allard de Vere Drummond , known professionally as Matthew Vaughn, is an English filmmaker. He has produced films including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch , and directed Layer Cake , Stardust , Kick-Ass , X-Men: First Class , Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle , and produced, co-wrote, and directed its prequel The King's Man .
Go to Profile#2954
Abu Zafar Obaidullah
#18296
Overall Influence
1934 - 2001 (67 years)
Abu Zafar Obaidullah was a Bangladeshi poet and civil servant. Two of his long poems, Aami-Kingbodontir-Kathaa Bolchi and Bristi O Shahosi Purush-er Jonyo Prarthona, have become famous since their first publication in the late 1970s.
Go to Profile#2955
Sonnet L'Abbé
#63331
Overall Influence
Sonnet L'Abbé, is a Canadian poet, editor, professor and critic. As a poet, L'Abbé writes about national identity, race, gender and language. Career L'Abbé has a PhD in English literature from the University of British Columbia, a master's degree in English literature from the University of Guelph and a BFA in film and video from York University. They have been a script reader and taught English at universities in South Korea, as well as teaching creative writing at the University of Toronto. From 2012 to 2014, they taught creative writing at UBC's Okanagan campus, and they currently teach at Vancouver Island University.
Go to Profile#2956
Tom Lutz
#73707
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tom Lutz is an American writer, literary critic and the founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Early life Lutz grew up in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. He graduated from Greenwich High School. After working for years as a cook, carpenter, and musician in New York, Florida, and Iowa, he got a job cooking breakfast and lunch at a small college where the financial aid officer offered to get him a Pell Grant so he could enroll at the college for free. He continued in the job and took afternoon and evening classes at the University of Dubuque before transferring and receiving his B.A. in English ...
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Christoph Bode
#57615
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christoph Bode is a literary scholar. His fields are British and American literature, comparative literature, literary theory, narratology, and travel writing. He is full professor and chair of Modern English literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Since 2009, Bode has been a reviewer and occasional columnist for Times Higher Education.
Go to Profile#2958
John Toland
#17652
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
John Willard Toland was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun. Biography Toland was born in 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1932 and from Williams College in 1936 and attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between college years, he traveled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which were performed. He reca...
Go to Profile#2959
Barbara Browning
#46571
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Barbara Browning is an American academic, novelist, dancer, and cultural critic. Education and career Browning received her B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1983, spent a year in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship, where she studied dance, and then returned to Yale to complete her Ph.D. in 1989. She taught for six years in the English Department of Princeton University, where she was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award, and since then has taught in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, serving for a tim...
Go to Profile#2960
Fred Pfeil
#55593
Overall Influence
1949 - 2005 (56 years)
John Frederick Pfeil was an American literary critic and novelist. Pfeil was born September 21 in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree at Amherst College in 1971 and an M.A. at Stanford University in 1973. He taught at Stanford, Stephens College, Oregon State University, and Trinity College .
Go to Profile#2961
Robert Bone
#74014
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Robert Adamson Bone was a scholar of African-American literature and a professor of English at Columbia University. Biography Bone was a conscientious objector during World War II. He received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1945. He was National Secretary of the Young People's Socialist League from 1946 to 1947, and then from 1947 to 1948 he worked in the automotive industry in Flint, Michigan. Returning to Yale, he earned a master's degree in American studies in 1949 and a doctorate in 1955. Bone taught at Yale and at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the f...
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Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
#39668
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz was an American biographer and writer on opera. She is mainly known for her biography of Giuseppe Verdi, a result of 30 years' research and published in 1992 by Oxford University Press. Born in Lebanon, Ohio and educated at Smith College and Columbia University, she lived for many years in Italy, and even after her return to the United States in the early 1970s spent her summers in Verdi's hometown of Busseto where she continued her exhaustive research into his life. She died in New York City at the age of 86, survived by three of her five children.
Go to Profile#2963
Mun Jeonghui
#94702
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mun Jeonghui is a South Korean poet. Life Mun Jeonghui was born in Boseong, Jeollanam-do, Korea on May 25, 1947. She attended Jinmyeong Girls' High School, majored in Korean Literature at Dongguk University, and completed her graduate studies from the same university, where she has also taught. While still in high school, she published her first collection of poems, Kkotsum . In 1969 Mun Jeonghui made her debut in literature when her poems "Bulmyeon" and "Haneul" were accepted in Wolgan Munhaks feature on new poets. In 2014, she served as the chairman of the Society of Korean Poets.
Go to Profile#2964
Isabel Freire de Matos
#33208
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Isabel Freire de Matos was a writer, educator, journalist, and activist for Puerto Rican independence. Freire de Matos was the author of several children's books and the wife of Francisco Matos Paoli, a high-ranking member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
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Thomas Flanagan
#41784
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Thomas Bonner Flanagan was an American university professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a novelist. Biography Flanagan was born in 1923 in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a homemaker mother and a dentist father. All of his grandparents had come to the United States from County Fermanagh, Ireland. He served in the United States Army during World War II. He graduated from Amherst College in 1945. He received his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University. From 1960 to 1978 he was Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in Irish literature.
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Gerald Eades Bentley
#58792
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Gerald Eades Bentley was an American academic and literary scholar, best remembered for his seven-volume work, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, published by Oxford University Press between 1941 and 1968. That work, modeled on Edmund Kerchever Chambers' classic four-volume The Elizabethan Stage, has itself become a standard and essential reference work on English Renaissance theatre.
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Armen Shekoyan
#80815
Overall Influence
1953 - 2021 (68 years)
Armen Shekoyan was an Armenian writer, poet and journalist. Biography Armen Shekoyan graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Khachatur Abovyan Yerevan State Pedagogical University in 1974. In 1985, Shekoyan studied at the higher literary courses of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. He worked at the Yerevan State Medical University, in the "Swallow" magazine, at the Literary Institute, at the "Soviet Writer" publishing house, at the RA Ministry of Culture. From 1990 to 1992, he was the editor-in-chief of "Nairi" publishing house, from 1992 to 1997 he was the director of Ho...
Go to Profile#2968
Fiona Maazel
#71188
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Fiona Maazel is the author of three novels: Last Last Chance, Woke Up Lonely, and A Little More Human. In 2008 she was named a 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Germà Colón
#54311
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Germà Colón i Doménech was a Spanish philologist of Romance philology and Catalan lexicology. He was appointed a professor at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. Biography Born on 30 November 1928 in Castellón de la Plana, Colón studied romance philology in the University of Barcelona with noted philologists such as Antoni Maria Badia i Margarit and Martí de Riquer, before graduating in 1951. He got his PhD the next year in the University of Madrid, with a thesis about dialectology .
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Sheila Callaghan
#51187
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
Go to Profile#2971
Bate Besong
#80525
Overall Influence
1954 - 2007 (53 years)
Bate Besong was a Cameroonian playwright, poet and critic, who was described by Pierre Fandio as “one of the most representative and regular writers of what might be referred to as the second generation of the emergent Cameroonian literature in English". He died on March 8, 2007, in a car accident on the Douala-Yaounde highway.
Go to Profile#2972
Gregory Blake Smith
#71514
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gregory Blake Smith is an American novelist and short story writer. His novel, The Divine Comedy of John Venner, was named a Notable Book of 1992 by The New York Times Book Review and his short story collection The Law of Miracles won the 2010 Juniper Prize for Fiction and the 2012 Minnesota Book Award.
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Michelle de Kretser
#63109
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michelle de Kretser is an Australian novelist who was born in Sri Lanka , and moved to Australia in 1972 when she was 14. Education and literary career De Kretser was educated at Methodist College, Colombo, in Melbourne at Elwood College, and in Paris.
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Jeong Ho-seung
#49757
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jeong Hoseung, also Jeong Ho-seung , is a popular South Korean poet. Life Born in South Gyeongsang Province in 1950, Jeong Hoseung grew up in Daegu, and graduated with a degree in Korean literature from Kyung Hee University. That same year, he began to contribute to the literary magazine 반시 , and published his first novel, Memorial Service . He was the winner of the Tenth Dong Seo Literary Prize in 1997, also winning the Sowol Poetry Prize
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Dennis Potter
#36413
Overall Influence
1935 - 1994 (59 years)
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone and Treacle . His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
Go to Profile#2976
Sterling D. Plumpp
#71278
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sterling Dominic Plumpp is an Americann poet, educator, editor, and critic. He has written numerous books, including Hornman , Harriet Tubman , Ornate With Smoke , Half Black, Half Blacker , and The Mojo Hands Call, I Must Go . Some of his work was included in The Best American Poetry 1996. He was an advisor for the television production of the documentary The Promised Land. Plump was awarded the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame's Fuller Award for lifetime achievement in September 2019.
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Glen Retief
#56935
Overall Influence
Glen Retief is a South African writer who won a Lambda Literary Award in 2012 for his memoir The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood. The Jack Bank was also an Africa Book Club Book of 2011.
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Bulat Okudzhava
#42485
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called "author song" , or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folk song traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political, the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Sovie...
Go to Profile#2979
Vinod Joshi
#84603
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Vinod Joshi is an Indian poet, writer and literary critic in Gujarati language from Gujarat, India. His notable works include Parantu, a collection of Geet , Shikhandi, a long narrative poem based on Shikhandi, a character from the Mahābhārata, Radio Natak: Swarup ane Siddhant , Tundil-tundika, a form of padyavarta, a Gujarati medieval literary genre, and Zalar Vage Zoothadi, a collection of poems. He is the recipient of the Jayant Pathak Puraskar , Critic's award , Kavishwar Dalpatram Award , Sahitya Gaurav Puraskar , Narsinh Mehta Award , Kalapi Award , Darshak Sahitya Sanman Award , and Na...
Go to Profile#2980
Ismith Khan
#36132
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
Mohamed Ismith Khan , better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
Go to Profile#2981
John Peel
#35282
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Peel is a British writer, best known for his TV series tie-in novels and novelisations. He has written under several pseudonyms, including "John Vincent" and "Nicholas Adams". He lives on Long Island, New York. While his wife is a US citizen, Peel continues to travel under a British passport.
Go to Profile#2982
Jonathan Hart
#54063
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jonathan Locke Hart is a Canadian poet, literary scholar and historian. Biography Hart trained at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Princeton University, Toronto, Cambridge and elsewhere and has given readings and lectures in many countries. He is currently employed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
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Frederik Stjernfelt
#15768
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Frederik Stjernfelt is a Danish professor and writer. As a professor, he lectures in science studies, history of ideas, and semiotics, at Aalborg University's Copenhagen department. Career Stjernfelt has been working as a reviewer and writer at 'Weekendavisen' since 1994. Earlier in his career, he was employed as an editor at Gyldendal's cultural journal 'Kritik' between 1993 and 2012. Stjernfelt has been a member of 'Danish Academy' since 2001. Also, he is cofounder of the political network 'Fri debat', which functions to promote freedom of speech. Subsequently, he has published a number of...
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Ken Hill
#48903
Overall Influence
1937 - 1995 (58 years)
Ken Hill was an English playwright and theatre director. Ken Hill was a protégé of Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop. He was known for his chaotic musicals on the tiny stage of the old Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Workshop's home in Stratford, London, but he also had hits in the West End and abroad. Among them were The Invisible Man and the original stage version of Phantom of the Opera, which inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber to create his musical blockbuster of the same title.
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Dan O'Brien
#58637
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Dan O’Brien is an American playwright, poet, essayist, and librettist. His most prominent works have been the play The Body of an American and the poetry collection War Reporter. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2015–16. His play The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage was the winner of the 2018 PEN America Award for Drama.
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Edward P. J. Corbett
#37360
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Edward P.J. Corbett was an American rhetorician, educator, and scholarly author. Corbett chaired the 1970 Conference on College Composition and Communication, and was chair of the organization and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English Executive Committee in 1971. He was also chair of the Rhetoric Society of America from 1973 to 1977. From 1974 to 1979, he was editor of the journal College Composition and Communication. He is known for promoting classical rhetoric among composition scholars and teachers.
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Horton Foote
#45342
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Albert Horton Foote Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received Academy Awards for his screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, which was adapted from the 1960 novel of the same name by Harper Lee, and his original screenplay for the film Tender Mercies . He was also known for his notable live television dramas produced during the Golden Age of Television.
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Robert Palladino
#23034
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Robert Joseph Palladino was an American Trappist monk, calligrapher, and academic. He was a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he taught Steve Jobs, and replaced Lloyd J. Reynolds as the head of the calligraphy program. Jobs credits Palladino's class with inspiring him to include multiple fonts on the original Mac. Despite his influence on Jobs, Palladino never owned a computer.
Go to Profile#2989
Herbert Blau
#17142
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Herbert Blau was an American director and theoretician of performance. He was named the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Early life and career Blau earned his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from New York University . Later, he earned his master of arts in drama and doctorate in English and American literature , both from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#2990
Martha Ronk
#52942
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Martha Clare Ronk is an American poet. Life She graduated from Wellesley College, and Yale University with a Ph.D. She taught at Colorado University and Otis College of Art and Design, and Naropa University Summer Writing Program. and Occidental College. She joined the Occidental faculty in 1981 and retired as a professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies in 2014.
Go to Profile#2991
Felix Kandel
#38414
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
#2992
Kazusuke Ogawa
#99009
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Kazusuke Ogawa was a Japanese literary critic. Ogawa was born in Tokyo, and graduated from Meiji University's Literature Department in 1951. Having Shin'ichirō Nakamura as his mentor, he began writing poetry and literary criticism, and after a stint as a high school teacher in Tochigi Prefecture, he became an assistant professor at Showa Women's University. After retiring, he also worked as a lecturer at his alma mater and at Tokyo Denki University. After 1990 many of his writings centered on cherry blossoms.
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Luis Alfaro
#55805
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist. He grew up in the Pico Union district near Downtown Los Angeles, and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in East Los Angeles. His plays and fiction are set in Los Angeles's Chicano barrios, including the Pico Union district, and often feature gay and lesbian and working-class themes. Many of Alfaro's plays also deal with the AIDS pandemic in Latino communities. Noted plays include "Bitter Homes and Gardens," "Pico Union," "Downtown," "Cuerpo Politizado," "Straight as a Line," "Breakfast, Lunch &...
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Rene Steinke
#41079
Overall Influence
Rene Steinke is an American novelist. She is the author of three novels: The Fires , Holy Skirts , and Friendswood . Holy Skirts, a novel based on the life of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
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Emily Lyle
#74657
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Emily Lyle is a Scottish ballad scholar and senior research fellow in the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Emily Lyle grew up in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire, Scotland. She studied English language and literature at the University of St Andrews , followed by an education course at the University of Glasgow .
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James Chandler
#44620
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
James Chandler is the director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and holds the Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Professorship in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. He was previously the George M. Pullman Professor in English Language & Literature at the same institution.
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Rosellen Brown
#63731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Rosellen Brown is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. The 1996 film Before and After was adapted from her novel of the same name.
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Muhsin al-Ramli
#74065
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Muhsin Al-Ramli is an expatriate Iraqi writer living in Madrid, Spain since 1995. He is a translator of several Spanish classics to Arabic. He produced the complete translation of Don Quixote from Spanish to Arabic. He teaches at the Saint Louis University Madrid Campus. He is the current editor of Alwah, a magazine of Arabic literature and thought, which he co-founded.
Go to Profile#2999
Edward Margolies
#82842
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Edward Margolies was an American literary critic and biographer. Early years Margolies was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. He was the youngest of four children, having three older sisters. Margolies served in World War II, guarding German and Italian prisoners of war. After the war, he attended Brown University on the G.I. Bill graduating in 1950. In 1958, he married Claire Norman, and the couple have three children.
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James Diggle
#68730
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Diggle, is a British classical scholar. He was Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Cambridge between 1995 and 2011. Early life and education Born in 1944, Diggle was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge; he completed Part II of the Classical Tripos in 1965, and went on to complete his doctoral studies there; his PhD was awarded in 1969.
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