Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#401

Kenneth Womack

#5618

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Kenneth Womack is an American writer, literary critic, public speaker, and music historian, particularly focusing on the cultural influence of the Beatles. He is the author of the bestselling Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles and John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.

#402

Olof Gigon

#6142

Overall Influence

1912 - 1998 (86 years)

Olof Alfred Gigon was a Swiss classical philologist. He is particularly known as a historian of philosophy and translator of ancient philosophical texts. Biography Olof Gigon, son of the physician Alfred Gigon , was born and grew up in Basel, where he studied classical and oriental philology. He spent one semester in Munich in years 1932/33. During his studies, he learned Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Gigon received his doctorate in 1934 with the dissertation research on Heraclitus. He spent the next two years studying in Paris. In 1937, he qualified as an assistant professor with an investiga...

#403

Hershel Parker

#7783

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick , and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which, with the publication of volume 13, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Uncompleted Writings, is now complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press .

#404

Peter Orlovsky

#5638

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet and actor. He was the long-time partner of Allen Ginsberg. Early life and career Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his impoverished family. After many odd jobs, he began working as an orderly at Creedmoor State Mental Hospital, known today as Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.

#405

Judy Blume

#7793

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 25 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. , Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing , Deenie , and Blubber . Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

#406

Adunis

#7344

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Ali Ahmad Said Esber , also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis , is a Syrian poet, essayist and translator. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry comparable to T.S. Eliot's in the anglophone world.

#407

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa

#6146

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his contribution to poetry.

#408

Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner

#3414

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Carl Frederick Buechner was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his career spanned more than six decades and encompassed many different genres. He wrote novels, including Godric , A Long Day's Dying and The Book of Bebb, his memoirs, including The Sacred Journey, and theological works, such as Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth.

#409

Peter Nicholls

#3987

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Peter Douglas Nicholls was an Australian literary scholar and critic. He was the creator and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction with John Clute. Early career Born in Australia's state of Victoria in Melbourne, he spent two decades from 1968 to 1988 as an expatriate, first in the USA, and then the UK.

#410

Eileen Myles

#6449

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow , which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.

#411

Roger McGough

#3720

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Roger Joseph McGough is an English poet, performance poet, broadcaster, children's author and playwright. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please, as well as performing his own poetry. McGough was one of the leading members of the Liverpool poets, a group of young poets influenced by Beat poetry and the popular music and culture of 1960s Liverpool. He is an honorary fellow of Liverpool John Moores University, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of the Poetry Society.

#412

Heiner Müller

#4017

Overall Influence

1929 - 1995 (66 years)

Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre. Biography Müller was born in Eppendorf, Saxony. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1946 which was in the course of the forced merger of the KPD and SPD subsumed into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany . He was soon expelled for lacking enthusiasm and failing to pay dues. In 1954 he became member of the German Writers' Association . Müller became one of the most important dramatist...

#413

Ariel Dorfman

#2095

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, since 1985.

#414

Amit Chaudhuri

#7456

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021, Since 2020, he has been at Ashoka University, India, as Professor of Creative Writing and, since 2021, is also Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University.

#415

Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson

#5958

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Julia Catherine Donaldson is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her...

#416

Barbara Johnson

#6007

Overall Influence

1947 - 2009 (62 years)

Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanianian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France.

#417

Arundhati Roy

#2015

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.

#418

Sławomir Mrożek

Sławomir Mrożek

#4927

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Sławomir Mrożek was a Polish dramatist, writer and cartoonist. Mrożek joined the Polish United Workers' Party during the reign of Stalinism in the People's Republic of Poland, and made a living as a political journalist. He began writing plays in the late 1950s. His theatrical works belong to the genre of absurdist fiction, intended to shock the audience with non-realistic elements, political and historic references, distortion, and parody.

#419

E. L. Doctorow

#5083

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction. He wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama, including the award-winning novels Ragtime , Billy Bathgate , and The March . These, like many of his other works, placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, with known historical figures, and often used different narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination.

#420

Edward Bond

#5363

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved , the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North , Lear , The Sea , The Fool , Restoration , and the War trilogy . Bond is broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and ...

#421

Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman

#5585

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.

#422

Richard Ford

#6838

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer, best known for his novels featuring Frank Bascombe. Early in his career, Ford established himself as a master of the short story genre when his first collection Rock Springs was published to immediate acclaim in 1987.

#423

Douglas Wolk

#6784

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Douglas Wolk is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. He has written about comics and popular music for publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Pitchfork Media, Vanity Fair, and The Believer. Wolk was the managing editor of CMJ New Music Monthly from 1993 to 1997, and hosted a radio show on WFMU from 1999 to 2001. He has four published books. The most recent, All of the Marvels, tours the Marvel comics universe via his project of reading all 27,000 Marvel superhero comics. In support of that project, in Jan...

#424

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson

#3892

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

#425

Betty T. Bennett

#10396

Overall Influence

1935 - 2006 (71 years)

Betty T. Bennett was Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. She was previously Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and acting provost of Pratt Institute from 1979 to 1985. Among her numerous awards and honors, Bennett was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and fellow of American Council of Learned Societies. She won the Keats-Shelley Association of America - Distinguished Scholar Award in 1992 and was Founding President, Phi Beta Kappa, Zeta Chapter at American University. Born in Brooklyn, New...

#426

Pepetela

#6580

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos is a major Angolan writer of fiction. He writes under the name Pepetela. A Portuguese Angolan, Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, and fought as a member of the MPLA in the long guerrilla war for Angola's independence. Much of his writing deals with Angola's political history in the 20th century. Mayombe, for example, is a novel that portrays the lives of a group of MPLA guerrillas who are involved in the anti-colonial struggle in Cabinda, Yaka follows the lives of members of a white settler family in the coastal town of Benguela, and A G...

#427

Lev Kopelev

#4591

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was a Soviet author and dissident. Early life Kopelev was born in Kyiv, then Russian Empire, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkiv. While a student at Kharkiv State University's philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in Russian and Ukrainian languages; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

#428

Jean Franco

#11987

Overall Influence

1924 - 2022 (98 years)

Jean Franco was a British-born American academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature. Educated at Manchester and London, she taught at London, Essex , and Stanford, and was latterly professor emerita at Columbia University.

#429

Roxane Gay

#4968

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist , as well as the short story collection Ayiti , the novel An Untamed State , the short story collection Difficult Women , and the memoir Hunger .

#430

Alan Sillitoe

#5746

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.

#431

Maria Janion

#4869

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Maria Janion was a Polish scholar, literary theorist and critic, as well as a feminist. She was a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, specialising in literary Romanticism.

#432

John Hollander

#7703

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

John Hollander was an American poet and literary critic. At the time of his death, he was Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

#433

Joseph Pearce

#6309

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Joseph Pearce , is an English-born American writer, and Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida.

#434

John McPhee

#2476

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World . In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

#435

Ben Okri

#7802

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. He received a knighthood in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

#436

Chang-Rae Lee

#12718

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.

#437

Yehuda Amichai

#5092

Overall Influence

1924 - 2000 (76 years)

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times. Amichai was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes, and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

#438

Tsuneari Fukuda

Tsuneari Fukuda

#11552

Overall Influence

1912 - 1994 (82 years)

was a Japanese dramatist, translator, and literary critic. From 1969 until 1983, he was a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University. He became a member of the Japan Art Academy in 1981. His criticism of the pacifist Japanese establishment of the early post-Second World War era earned him early notoriety, though he is most well known for his translations of William Shakespeare's oeuvre into Japanese, starting with Hamlet in 1955. He was a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Bungeishunjū, Shokun, and Jiyū. Called a "rhetorician", and a "conjuror of controversy", he frequently used...

#439

Gian Biagio Conte

Gian Biagio Conte

#14018

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Gian Biagio Conte is an Italian classicist and professor of Latin Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. Life Conte completed his studies in classical philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he was influenced by scholars such as Antonio La Penna, Sebastiano Timpanaro and . In particular with the first of these, he first had a fruitful period of collaboration, but then broke contact abruptly in an exchange of letters. Conte also went abroad to study in Munich with Friedrich Klingner and in Paris. At the age of 30, he was made professor of Latin Literature at the U...

#440

Bobbie Ann Mason

#7913

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Early life and education A child of Wilburn and Christianna Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky, with four siblings and her great niece Mya Mason. As a child she loved to read with encouragement from her parents; however, choices were limited. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books s...

#441

Red Skelton

#1627

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Richard Red Skelton was an American entertainer best known for his national radio and television shows between 1937 and 1971, especially as host of the television program The Red Skelton Show. He has stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in radio and television, and also appeared in burlesque, vaudeville, films, nightclubs, and casinos, all while he pursued an entirely separate career as an artist.

#442

M. John Harrison

#6226

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Michael John Harrison , known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories , Climbers , and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light , Nova Swing and Empty Space .

#443

Billy Collins

#4730

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

#444

Jason Thompson

#3640

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Jason Bradley Thompson is an American artist, author, comics creator, critic, and editor. He is best known for his Eisner-nominated book Manga: The Complete Guide, his graphic novel interpretation of H. P. Lovecraft's DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories, and his Dungeons and Dragons adventure walkthrough maps published by Wizards of the Coast on their website as well in books such as Waterdeep Dragon Heist.

#445

Victor Pelevin

#3765

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include Omon Ra , The Life of Insects , Chapayev and Void , and Generation P . He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize and the Russian National Bestseller , the former for the short story collection The Blue Lantern . His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement.

#446

Tess Gallagher

#11136

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, and short story writer. Among her many honors were a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts award, Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.

#447

Emma Donoghue

#7204

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

#448

Howard Fast

#3367

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E.V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson. Biography Early life Fast was born in New York City. His mother, Ida , was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who shortened his name from Fastovsky upon arrival in America. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother, Julius, went to live with relatives, while he and his older brother, Jerome, sold newspapers. Howard credited his early voracious reading to ...

#449

Mahmoud Amin El Alem

#17517

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Mahmoud Amin El Alem was an award-winning Egyptian cultural critic and leading Marxist theorist. He was a leading public intellectual in Egypt in his day. El Alem was also the head of the administrative board of Akhbar el-Yom and editor of several newspapers and magazines, including Rose al-Yūsuf, ar-Risala al-gadida, Magallat al-musawwir, and Qadaya fikriyya.

#450

Robert Hughes

#2545

Overall Influence

1938 - 2012 (74 years)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."

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