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,
#451
Gary Westfahl
#7879
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gary Wesley Westfahl is an American scholar of science fiction. He has written reviews for the Los Angeles Times, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and Locus Online. He worked at the University of California, Riverside until 2011 and is now an adjunct professor at the University of La Verne.
Go to Profile#452
Gary Shteyngart
#10352
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Gary Shteyngart is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical. Early life Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist.
Go to Profile#453
J. M. G. Le Clézio
#5280
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio , usually identified as J. M. G. Le Clézio, of French and Mauritian nationality, is a writer and professor. The author of over forty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".
Go to Profile#454
Anthony Hecht
#5698
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
Go to Profile#455
Michael Joyce
#9469
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Joyce is a retired professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature. Joyce's afternoon, a story, 1987, was among the first literary works of hypertext fiction to present itself as undeniably serious literature, and experimented with the short-story form in novel ways. It was created with the then-new Storyspace software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading.
Go to Profile#456
Lois Duncan
#8449
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Lois Duncan Steinmetz , known as Lois Duncan, was an American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist. She is best known for her young-adult novelss, and has been credited by historians as a pioneering figure in the development of young-adult fiction, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense.
Go to Profile#457
Holly Black
#7514
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Holly Black is an American writer and editor best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling young adult Folk of the Air series. She is also well known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and her debut trilogy of young adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales. Black has won an Eisner Award, a Lodestar Award, a Nebula Award, and a Newbery Honor.
Go to Profile#458
Gore Vidal
#5567
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the U.S. House of Representatives , and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate .
Go to Profile#459
Blake Morrison
#6507
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? , which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Go to Profile#460
Derek Mahon
#9279
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
Go to Profile#461
Max Allan Collins
#4084
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer, noted for his graphic novels. His work has been published in several formats and his Road to Perdition series was the basis for a film of the same name. He wrote the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for many years and has produced numerous novels featuring the character as well.
Go to Profile#462
Will Self
#5112
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
William Woodard Self is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Self is currently Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University London, where he teaches psychogeography.
Go to Profile#463
Stanisław Barańczak
#7282
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Stanisław Barańczak was a Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He is perhaps most well known for his English-to-Polish translations of the dramas of William Shakespeare and of the poetry of E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Keats, Robert Frost, Edward Lear and others.
Go to Profile#464
Richard Flanagan
#5184
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan was described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists".
Go to Profile#465
Bel Kaufman
#7427
Overall Influence
1911 - 2014 (103 years)
Bella Kaufman was an American teacher and author, well known for writing the bestselling 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase. Early life Bella's father, Michael Kaufman and her mother, Lala Kaufman were both from Russia and married in 1909. Bella Kaufman was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1911, where her father was studying medicine. The family subsequently returned to Russia where her father completed his studies. Her father eventually became a physician, and her mother, the second-oldest daughter of famed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, later established herself as a writer under the name Lala...
Go to Profile#466
Tomas Venclova
#9676
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980, he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations , and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.
Go to Profile#467
Don Rickles
#1238
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Donald Jay Rickles was an American stand-up comedian and actor. He became known primarily for his insult comedy. His film roles include Run Silent, Run Deep , Enter Laughing , Kelly's Heroes , and Casino . From 1976 to 1978, Rickles had a two-season starring role in the NBC television sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey, having previously starred in two eponymous half-hour programs, an ABC variety show titled The Don Rickles Show and a CBS sitcom identically titled The Don Rickles Show .
Go to Profile#468
Captain Charles Johnson
#1736
Overall Influence
Captain Charles Johnson was the British author of the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, whose identity remains a mystery. No record exists of a captain by this name, and "Captain Charles Johnson" is generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. Some scholars have suggested that the author was actually Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed.
Go to Profile#469
Alastair Fowler
#11363
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Alastair David Shaw Fowler CBE FBA was a Scottish literary critic, editor, and an authority on Edmund Spenser, Renaissance literature, genre theory, and numerology. Life and career Alastair Fowler was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1930. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, M.A. . He was subsequently awarded an M.A. , D.Phil. and D.Litt. from Oxford. As a graduate student at Oxford, Fowler studied with C. S. Lewis, and later edited Lewis's Spenser's Images of Life.
Go to Profile#470
Nizar Qabbani
#5722
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani was a Syrian diplomat, poet, writer and publisher. He is considered to be Syria's National Poet. His poetic style combines simplicity and elegance in exploring themes of love, eroticism, religion, and Arab empowerment against foreign imperialism and local dictators. Qabbani is one of the most revered contemporary poets in the Arab world.
Go to Profile#471
Jonathan Safran Foer
#6277
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , Here I Am , and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast . He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Go to Profile#472
Kōbō Abe
#8039
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Kōbō Abe, pen name of Kimifusa Abe, was a Japanese writer, playwright, musician, photographer, and inventor. He is best known for his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes that was made into an award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society.
Go to Profile#473
Ian La Frenais
#7938
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ian La Frenais is an English writer best known for his creative partnership with Dick Clement. They are most famous for television series including The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge and its sequel Going Straight, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Go to Profile#474
Dave Thompson
#6301
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
David Thompson is an English writer who is the author of more than 100 books, largely dealing with rock and pop music, but also covering film, sports, philately, numismatics and erotica. He wrote regularly for Melody Maker and Record Collector in the 1980s, and has since contributed to magazines such as Mojo, Q, Rolling Stone and Goldmine.
Go to Profile#475
David Storey
#6340
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
David Malcolm Storey was an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a professional rugby league player. He won the Booker Prize in 1976 for his novel Saville. He also won the MacMillan Fiction Award for This Sporting Life in 1960.
Go to Profile#476
Michael Longley
#9602
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Longley, , is an Irish poet. Life and career One of twin boys, Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to English parents, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Paul Durcan. He was succeeded in 2010 by Harry Clifton. North American editions of Longley's work are published by Wake Forest University Pres...
Go to Profile#477
N. Katherine Hayles
#4827
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
Go to Profile#478
Jean-Claude Carrière
#2121
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Jean-Claude Carrière was a French novelist, screenwriter and actor. He received an Academy Award for best short film for co-writing Heureux Anniversaire , and was later conferred an Honorary Oscar in 2014. He was nominated for the Academy Award three other times for his work in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie , That Obscure Object of Desire , and The Unbearable Lightness of Being . He also won a César Award for Best Original Screenplay in The Return of Martin Guerre .
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Claudio Magris
#6349
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Claudio Magris is an Italian scholar, translator and writer. He was a senator for Friuli Venezia Giulia from 1994 to 1996. Life Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978.
Go to Profile#480
Cesare Segre
#21153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Cesare Segre was an Italian philologist, semiotician and literary critic of Jewish descent, and the Director of the Texts and Textual Traditions Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Pavia .
Go to Profile#481
Pete Brown
#6289
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Peter Ronald Brown was an English performance poet, lyricist, and singer best known for his collaborations with Cream and Jack Bruce. Brown formed the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments and Pete Brown & Piblokto! and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also wrote film scripts and formed a film production company.
Go to Profile#482
Susan Howe
#7736
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre . Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Go to Profile#483
Lyn Hejinian
#12948
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .
Go to Profile#484
Ales Adamovich
#9347
Overall Influence
1927 - 1994 (67 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Adamovich was a Soviet Belarusian writer, screenwriter, literary critic and democratic activist. He wrote in both the Russian and Belarusian languages. Having fought as a child soldier in the Belarusian resistance during World War II, much of Adamovich's work revolved around the German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II and the Belarusian partisan movement. Among his best-known books are Khatyn and The Blockade Book. Adamovich also wrote multiple screenplays, including that of Come and See.
Go to Profile#485
Stanley Kunitz
#7250
Overall Influence
1905 - 2006 (101 years)
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000. Biography Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children, to Yetta Helen and Solomon Z. Kunitz, both of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent.
Go to Profile#486
Friedrich Kittler
#6176
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military. Biography Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His family fled with him to West Germany in 1958, where from 1958 to 1963 he went to a natural sciences and modern languages Gymnasium in Lahr in the Black Forest, and thereafter, until 1972, he studied German studies, Romance philology and philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Go to Profile#487
Ahmed Ali
#6234
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Ahmed Ali was a Pakistani novelist, poet, critic, translator, diplomat and scholar. A pioneer of the modern Urdu short story, his works include the short story collections: , 1932; Hamari Gali , 1940; Qaid Khana , 1942; and Maut Se Pehle , 1945. His other writings include Twilight in Delhi , his first novel in the English language.
Go to Profile#488
Luisa Valenzuela
#12905
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Luisa Valenzuela Levinson is an Argentine post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective.
Go to Profile#489
Arthur Danto
#970
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Arthur Coleman Danto was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Go to Profile#490
Kimon Friar
#5823
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Kimon Friar was a Greek-American poet and translator of Greek poetry. Youth and education Friar was born in 1911 in İmralı, Ottoman Empire , to a Greek father and a Greek mother. In 1915, the family moved to the United States and Friar became an American citizen in 1920. As a child, Friar had problems with the English language, and so he spent his time on artistic efforts. At a young age, despite his trouble with English, Friar discovered poetry and later he became interested in drama. After reading Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, Friar became fascinated with the energy of the English lan...
Go to Profile#491
John Edgar Wideman
#4487
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Edgar Wideman is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. He was the first person to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice. His writing is known for experimental techniques and a focus on the African-American experience.
Go to Profile#492
Colson Whitehead
#11283
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad , for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#493
Jacqueline Rose
#3258
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jacqueline Rose, FBA, FRSL is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Life and work Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and gained her higher degree from the Sorbonne, Paris. She took her doctorate from the University of London, where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose.
Go to Profile#494
Diane di Prima
#6020
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Diane di Prima was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.
Go to Profile#495
Franco Moretti
#7810
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Franco Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist. He graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972. He has taught at the universities of Salerno and Verona ; in the US, at Columbia and Stanford , where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel, and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton, the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, and has been a lecturer and visiting professor in many countries, including, until the end of 2019, the...
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Natasha Trethewey
#8151
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Go to Profile#497
George C. Wolfe
#4613
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
George Costello Wolfe is an American playwright and director of theater and film. He won a Tony Award in 1993 for directing Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and another Tony Award in 1996 for his direction of the musical Bring in 'da Noise/Bring in 'da Funk. He served as Artistic Director of The Public Theater from 1993 until 2004.
Go to Profile#498
Takeo Okuno
#12535
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Takeo Okuno, was a Japanese chemist and a leading literary critic of the postwar era. A close friend of philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto and writer Yukio Mishima, he helped draw attention to a new generation of postwar Japanese authors and push the Japanese literary world to break free from hegemonic ideologies and pursue more individualistic forms of expression.
Go to Profile#499
Rita Felski
#4108
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark .
Go to Profile#500
Thomas Berger
#8677
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.
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