Historical Figures from USA
The most influential historical figures born in or associated with USA.
Carl Sagan
82Carl Sagan was an American astronomer and planetary scientist who became the world's most famous communicator of science, reaching millions through the television series Cosmos and best-selling books that made him a celebrated author as well as a researcher.
Edgar Allan Poe
81Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer and poet, a master of the macabre, who invented the detective story, helped shape the modern short story and science fiction, and gave the world haunting tales and poems such as "The Raven".
Emily Dickinson
80Emily Dickinson was an American poet who lived in near-seclusion and published almost nothing in her lifetime, yet whose nearly 1,800 original, compressed poems made her, after her death, one of the most important poets in the English language.
Ernest Hemingway
82Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, understated prose style revolutionized 20th-century fiction, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as The Old Man and the Sea.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
80F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer, the great chronicler of the Jazz Age, whose novel The Great Gatsby is often called the quintessential American novel.
Frederick Douglass
84Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, orator and writer who escaped slavery to become the most powerful voice of the antislavery movement and one of the foremost advocates for equality and human rights in the 19th century.
Harriet Tubman
83Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist who escaped slavery and then risked her life repeatedly to lead dozens of enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad, becoming one of the great heroes of the fight against slavery.
Helen Keller
80Helen Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate and activist who, though deaf and blind from infancy, learned to communicate, graduated from college, and wrote books that inspired the world and advanced the cause of people with disabilities.
Henry David Thoreau
80Henry David Thoreau was an American writer, naturalist and philosopher whose book Walden and essay "Civil Disobedience" became foundational texts of environmental thought and nonviolent resistance, influencing reformers around the world.
Herman Melville
80Herman Melville was an American novelist and poet whose Moby-Dick, neglected in his lifetime, is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written and a towering achievement of American literature.
Mark Twain
84Mark Twain was an American writer and humorist, called the "father of American literature", whose novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captured the voice of America and remain classics of world literature.
Maya Angelou
80Maya Angelou was an American writer, poet and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became a landmark of American literature, giving powerful voice to Black womanhood, trauma and resilience.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
78Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short-story writer whose dark, morally probing fiction — above all The Scarlet Letter — explored sin, guilt and hypocrisy in Puritan New England and helped found the American novel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
80Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement and, through works such as "Self-Reliance" and "Nature", shaped American thought and called a new national literature into being.
Rosa Parks
82Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal moment in the struggle against racial segregation.
T. S. Eliot
80T. S. Eliot was an American-British poet, critic and playwright, a towering figure of literary modernism whose poem The Waste Land redefined 20th-century poetry and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Theodore Roosevelt
85Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, a soldier, conservationist and reformer — and a remarkably prolific author who wrote around forty books on history, nature, politics and exploration alongside his public career.
Thomas Edison
88Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman whose innovations — including a practical electric light, the phonograph and systems for distributing electricity — helped create the modern industrial world.
Toni Morrison
81Toni Morrison was an American novelist whose richly poetic explorations of Black American life — above all Beloved — won her the Pulitzer Prize and made her the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Walt Whitman
81Walt Whitman was an American poet whose collection Leaves of Grass broke from traditional verse to celebrate democracy, the body and the self in sweeping free verse, making him a founding father of modern American poetry.
William Faulkner
80William Faulkner was an American novelist whose dense, experimental novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of the Deep South — including The Sound and the Fury — won him the Nobel Prize in Literature and made him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.