← 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 - 26
T. E. Lawrence10 decades - 27
Ludwig Wittgenstein8 decades - 28
Mikhail Bulgakov8 decades - 29
T. S. Eliot11 decades - 30
Aldous Huxley10 decades - 31
Niels Bohr10 decades - 32
Vyacheslav Molotov7 decades - 33
Martin Heidegger10 decades - 34
Antonio Gramsci9 decades - 35
Vladimir Mayakovsky11 decades - 36
Le Corbusier10 decades - 37
Joachim von Ribbentrop9 decades - 38
Erwin Schrödinger11 decades - 39
Bernard Montgomery5 decades - 40
Mae West10 decades - 41
Anna Akhmatova11 decades - 42
Diego Rivera14 decades - 43
Ezra Pound11 decades - 44
Groucho Marx9 decades - 45
Harold Macmillan9 decades - 46
Georgia O'Keeffe9 decades - 47
Alfonso XIII of Spain7 decades - 48
Charles I of Austrianot measured- - 49
C. V. Raman0 decades - 50
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan7 decades - 51
Marina Tsvetaeva10 decades - 52
Mary Pickford11 decades - 53
Ernst Röhm9 decades - 54
António de Oliveira Salazar0 decades - 55
John Fordnot measured- - 56
Sergei Prokofiev9 decades - 57
D. H. Lawrence11 decades - 58
Marc Chagall10 decades - 59
Eugene O'Neill10 decades - 60
Jean Cocteau11 decades - 61
Louis-Ferdinand Céline9 decades - 62
Nestor Makhno7 decades - 63
Walter Benjamin10 decades - 64
Gabriela Mistral11 decades - 65
Erich von Manstein7 decades - 66
Vidkun Quisling1 decades - 67
Rudolph Valentino10 decades - 68
Heinz Guderian8 decades - 69
Marcus Garvey10 decades - 70
Rafael Trujillo9 decades - 71
Alfred Rosenberg10 decades - 72
J. Paul Getty8 decades - 73
Joan Miró9 decades - 74
Henry Millernot measured- - 75
Friedrich Paulus7 decades - 76
Chester W. Nimitz8 decades - 77
Lillian Gish10 decades - 78
Carl Schmitt11 decades - 79
Padre Pio7 decades - 80
Alfred Jodl8 decades - 81
Nikolai Bukharin5 decades - 82
Maximilian Kolbe1 decades - 83
Marcel Duchamp10 decades - 84
Julius Streicher9 decades - 85
Walter Ulbricht9 decades - 86Dale Carnegie9 decades
- 87
Stan Laurel6 decades - 88
Raymond Chandler8 decades - 89
Colonel Sanders0 decades - 90
Boris Pasternak0 decades - 91
Paramahansa Yogananda6 decades - 92
Fritz Lang9 decades - 93
Marc Bloch12 decades - 94
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Sinclair Lewis11 decades - 95
Martin Niemöller9 decades - 96
Ip Mannot measured- - 97
Pearl S. Buck9 decades - 98
Mikhail Tukhachevsky7 decades - 99
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe7 decades - 100
Boris Karloff9 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.