← Fame through time1900-1909
The 1900s
Whose names filled the books of the 1900s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 1900s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus43 - 2
Augustus9.2 - 3
Homer8.8 - 4
Plato7.3 - 5
Cicero6.2 - 6
Aristotle5.9 - 7
Virgil4.3 - 8
Johns Hopkins4.1 - 9
Socrates3.5 - 10
George Washington2.4 - 11
Plutarch2.3 - 12
William Henry2.3 - 13
Abraham Lincoln2.3 - 14
Herodotus2.3 - 15
Charlemagne2.3 - 16
Cleopatra2.2 - 17
Euclid2.1 - 18
Walter Scott2.0 - 19
Ovid1.9 - 20
John Smith1.8 - 21
Demosthenes1.7 - 22
Rembrandt1.6 - 23
Euripides1.6 - 24
John the Baptist1.5 - 25
Pericles1.5
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1900s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Winston Churchill13 decades - 2
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 3
Mahatma Gandhi10 decades - 4
Marie Curie4 decades - 5
George V16 decades - 6
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 7
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 8
Nicholas II of Russia14 decades - 9
Sun Yat-sen12 decades - 10
Calvin Coolidge11 decades - 11
Warren G. Harding11 decades - 12
Rudyard Kipling13 decades - 13
Frank Lloyd Wright12 decades - 14
Rosa Luxemburg13 decades - 15
Neville Chamberlain16 decades - 16
H. G. Wells16 decades - 17
Bertrand Russell13 decades - 18
Harry Houdini7 decades - 19
Marcel Proust12 decades - 20
Henri Matisse12 decades - 21
Sergei Rachmaninoffnot measured- - 22
Robert Frost13 decades - 23
W. B. Yeats12 decades - 24
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 25
Beatrix Potter10 decades - 26
Roald Amundsen12 decades - 27
Ernest Shackleton11 decades - 28
Wassily Kandinsky4 decades - 29
Maxim Gorky13 decades - 30
Guglielmo Marconi13 decades - 31
W. E. B. Du Bois12 decades - 32
Alexander Kolchak4 decades - 33
Ivan Bunin11 decades - 34
Maria Montessori12 decades - 35
Mary of Tecknot measured- - 36
Emma Goldman12 decades - 37
Fritz Haber11 decades - 38
Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim0 decades - 39
Ernest Rutherford12 decades - 40
Luigi Pirandello13 decades - 41
Laura Ingalls Wilder8 decades - 42
W. Somerset Maugham0 decades - 43
Gertrude Stein10 decades - 44
Erik Satie11 decades - 45
Victor Emmanuel III of Italy8 decades - 46
André Gide13 decades - 47
Józef Piłsudski3 decades - 48
Nadezhda Krupskaya11 decades - 49
Erich Ludendorff10 decades - 50
Piet Mondrian7 decades - 51
Friedrich Ebert11 decades - 52
Alfred Adler11 decades - 53
Robert Falcon Scott3 decades - 54
Aurobindo Ghosh4 decades - 55
Léon Blum13 decades - 56
Jean Sibelius0 decades - 57
Stanley Baldwin10 decades - 58
Emilio Aguinaldo13 decades - 59
Howard Carter12 decades - 60
Guangxu Emperor7 decades - 61
Arnold Schoenberg11 decades - 62
Alexandra Kollontai7 decades - 63
Albert Fishnot measured- - 64
Colettenot measured- - 65
Rubén Darío14 decades - 66
Enrico Caruso12 decades - 67
Karl Liebknecht11 decades - 68
Miklós Horthy1 decades - 69
Pietro Badoglio11 decades - 70
Ramsay MacDonald12 decades - 71
Lucy Maud Montgomery3 decades - 72
Francisco I. Madero12 decades - 73
Grazia Deledda13 decades - 74
Nicholas Roerich7 decades - 75
Miguel Primo de Riveranot measured- - 76
Alexander Scriabin3 decades - 77
Constantine I of Greece0 decades - 78
George Gurdjieff0 decades - 79
Anton Denikin3 decades - 80
Magnus Hirschfeld12 decades - 81
Chaim Weizmann11 decades - 82
Scott Joplin7 decades - 83
Haakon VII of Norway0 decades - 84
John Galsworthy12 decades - 85
Heinrich Mann12 decades - 86
Sai Baba of Shirdinot measured- - 87
Lavr Kornilov5 decades - 88
Benedetto Croce14 decades - 89
Madam C. J. Walkernot measured- - 90
Paul Valéry12 decades - 91
Margaret Brownnot measured- - 92
Gustav Holst7 decades - 93
Albert Lebrun11 decades - 94
Romain Rolland13 decades - 95
Emanuel Lasker5 decades - 96
Aleksandr Kuprin12 decades - 97
Mary Mallonnot measured- - 98
Gertrude Bell10 decades - 99
Theodore Dreiser11 decades - 100
Władysław Reymont0 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.