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,
#301
Kenneth Koch
#5492
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.
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Augusto Roa Bastos
#7065
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Augusto Roa Bastos was a Paraguayan novelist and short story writer. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor. He is best known for his complex novel Yo el Supremo and for winning the Premio Miguel de Cervantes in 1989, Spanish literature's most prestigious prize. Yo el Supremo explores the dictations and inner thoughts of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the eccentric dictator of Paraguay who ruled with an iron fist, from 1814 until his death in 1840.
Go to Profile#303
Barbara Smith
#3557
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation....
Go to Profile#304
Breyten Breytenbach
#3499
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship.
Go to Profile#305
James Lapine
#3022
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James Elliot Lapine is an American stage director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
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Marilyn French
#2181
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Marilyn French was an American radical feminist author, most widely known for her second book and first novel, the 1977 work The Women's Room. Life French was born in Brooklyn to E. Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department store clerk. In her youth, she was a journalist, writing a neighborhood newsletter. She played the piano and dreamed of becoming a composer. She received a bachelor's degree from Hofstra University in 1951, in philosophy and English literature. Marilyn Edwards married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950 and supported him while he attended law school. The couple had two children.
Go to Profile#307
Algis Budrys
#5464
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Algirdas Jonas "Algis" Budrys was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He was also known under the pen names Frank Mason, Alger Rome , John A. Sentry, William Scarff, and Paul Janvier. He is known for the influential 1960 novel Rogue Moon.
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John Perry Barlow
#925
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
John Perry Barlow was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
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James Merrill
#3930
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover , which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.
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Vasily Aksyonov
#5107
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He became known in the West as the author of The Burn and of Generations of Winter , a family saga following three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
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Sonia Sanchez
#4857
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, includ...
Go to Profile#312
Alison Lurie
#5178
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Alison Stewart Lurie was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
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Terri Windling
#8566
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
Go to Profile#314
Michael Morpurgo
#3592
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Michael Andrew Bridge Morpurgo is an English book author, poet, playwright, and librettist who is known best for children's novels such as War Horse . His work is noted for its "magical storytelling", for recurring themes such as the triumph of an outsider or survival, for characters' relationships with nature, and for vivid settings such as the Cornish coast or World War I. Morpurgo became the third Children's Laureate, from 2003 to 2005, and he is also the current President of BookTrust, the UK's largest children's reading charity.
Go to Profile#315
Douglas Coupland
#1610
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was...
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Jane Chance
#9538
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jane Chance , also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.
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Gerald Vizenor
#4824
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. After a stint in the military upon returning to the United States in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G.I. Bill funding to complete his undergraduate degree at New York University.
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Elias Canetti
#3395
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Elias Canetti was a German-language writer, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna.
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Sara Danius
#6243
Overall Influence
1962 - 2019 (57 years)
Sara Maria Danius was a Swedish literary critic and philosopher, and a scholar of literature and aesthetics. Danius was professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, docent of literature at Uppsala University and professor in literary science at Stockholm University.
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Edwidge Danticat
#4498
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#321
George Szirtes
#9176
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
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Frederick Crews
#1032
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Frederick Campbell Crews is an American essayist and literary critic. Professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews is the author of numerous books, including The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James , E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism , and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes , a discussion of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex , a book of satirical essays parodying contemporary casebooks. Initially a proponent of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Crews ...
Go to Profile#323
Martin Esslin
#3475
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Martin Julius Esslin OBE was a Hungarian-born British producer, dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama, known for coining the term "theatre of the absurd" in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd. This work has been called "the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s".
Go to Profile#324
Lydia Davis
#5126
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
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Keith Giffen
#2791
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Keith Ian Giffen was an American comics artist and writer. He was known for his work for DC Comics on their Legion of Super-Heroes and Justice League titles as well as for being the co-creator of Lobo, Rocket Raccoon, and Jaime Reyes.
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Ken Liu
#3424
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ken Liu is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
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Elias Khoury
#3639
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist and public intellectual. His novels and literary criticism have been translated into several languages. In 2000, he won the Prize of Palestine for his book Gate of the Sun, and he won the Al Owais Award for fiction writing in 2007. Khoury has also written three plays and two screenplays.
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Robertson Davies
#2089
Overall Influence
1913 - 1995 (82 years)
William Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
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Chuck Palahniuk
#4411
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American novelist who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He has published 19 novels, three nonfiction books, two graphic novels, and two adult coloring books, as well as several short stories. His first published novel was Fight Club, which was adapted into a film of the same title.
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Cherríe Moraga
#3146
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena, which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
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Barbara Kingsolver
#3279
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
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Rebecca Solnit
#5070
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Early life and education Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. In 1966, her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female was hated," she has said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests.
Go to Profile#333
Francine Prose
#6075
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a visiting professor of literature at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center. Life and career Born in Brooklyn, Prose graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991. Prose's novel The Glorious Ones has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.
Go to Profile#334
Harold Acton
#3363
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton was a British writer, scholar, and aesthete who was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things. He wrote fiction, biography, history and autobiography. During his stay in China, he studied the Chinese language, traditional drama, and poetry, some of which he translated.
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Darko Suvin
#4455
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Darko Ronald Suvin is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language , he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.
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Pete Hamill
#2788
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Pete Hamill was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor. During his career as a New York City journalist, he was described as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime." Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
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Tom Clancy
#1063
Overall Influence
1947 - 2013 (66 years)
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on screenplays written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees.
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George Lamming
#8535
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#3241
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors" of Nigerian fiction who are attracting a wider audience, particularly in her second home, the United States.
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Matt Zoller Seitz
#3897
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Matt Zoller Seitz is an American film and television critic, author and filmmaker. Career Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com, and the television critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com, as well as a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards board of jurors. He was previously a television critic at Salon.com and The Newark Star Ledger, and a film critic for The New York Times. Prior to this he was a regular media columnist for the Dallas Observer. He founded the film and media criticism blog The House Next Door. Seitz is known as a leader in the creation of video essa...
Go to Profile#341
Norman O. Brown
#1596
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Norman Oliver Brown was an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher. Beginning as a classical scholar, his later work branched into wide-ranging, erudite, and intellectually sophisticated considerations of history, literature, psychoanalysis, culture, and other topics. Brown advanced some novel theses and in his time achieved some general notability.
Go to Profile#342
Robert Alter
#5668
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018.
Go to Profile#343
Adam Zagajewski
#5924
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, and the 2018 Golden Wreath of Poetry at the Struga Poetry Evenings.
Go to Profile#344
Camilo José Cela
#5259
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Camilo José Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquess of Iria Flavia was a Spanish novelist, poet, story writer and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability".
Go to Profile#345
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
#3530
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy. Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and wrote extensively on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, German Romanticism, Paul Celan, and Gérard Granel. He also translated works by Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin into French.
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Patricia Highsmith
#5115
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene.
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Seamus Deane
#6761
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
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Imre Kertész
#5074
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Imre Kertész was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of the Holocaust , dictatorship, and personal freedom.
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Brian Jacques
#7709
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
James Brian Jacques was an English novelist known for his Redwall series of novels and Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series. He also completed two collections of short stories entitled The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales.
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Frank Belknap Long
#5838
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Frank Belknap Long Jr. was an American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos alongside his friend, H. P. Lovecraft. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement , the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement , and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award .
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