← Fame through time1920-1929
The 1920s
Whose names filled the books of the 1920s - 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 1920s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus30 - 2
Homer8.5 - 3
Plato6.8 - 4
Aristotle6.3 - 5
Augustus6.2 - 6
Cicero5.2 - 7
Johns Hopkins4.4 - 8
George Washington3.6 - 9
Virgil3.6 - 10
Socrates3.5 - 11
Abraham Lincoln2.7 - 12
Euclid2.4 - 13
Pocahontas1.9
- 14
Plutarch1.8 - 15
Woodrow Wilson1.7 - 16
William Henry1.7 - 17
Theodore Roosevelt1.7 - 18
Ovid1.7 - 19
Mark Twain1.6 - 20
Cleopatra1.6 - 21
Herodotus1.6 - 22
Charlemagne1.5 - 23
Henry Ford1.5 - 24
Benjamin Franklin1.4 - 25
Euripides1.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1920s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Adolf Hitler10 decades - 2
Mao Zedong13 decades - 3
Charlie Chaplin11 decades - 4
Dwight D. Eisenhower9 decades - 5
J. R. R. Tolkien7 decades - 6
Charles de Gaulle9 decades - 7
Agatha Christie10 decades - 8
Nikita Khrushchev10 decades - 9
Hermann Göring9 decades - 10
Chiang Kai-shek4 decades - 11
Francisco Franco9 decades - 12
Edward VIII9 decades - 13
Jawaharlal Nehru10 decades - 14
B. R. Ambedkar8 decades - 15
Srinivasa Ramanujan0 decades - 16
Ho Chi Minh8 decades - 17
Erwin Rommel8 decades - 18
Josip Broz Tito8 decades - 19
H. P. Lovecraft6 decades - 20
Haile Selassie0 decades - 21
Sergei Yesenin11 decades - 22
Rudolf Hess9 decades - 23
George S. Patton8 decades - 24
David Ben-Gurionnot measured- - 25
Karl Dönitz8 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.