← 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 Chinese books during the 1920s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong110 - 2
Sun Yat-sen66 - 3
Zhu De17 - 4
Zhou Enlai11 - 5
Yuan Shikai10.0 - 6
Lu Xun8.5 - 7
Hsu Shih-chang7.7 - 8
Wu Qi6.0 - 9
Confucius5.5 - 10
Lin Biao3.1 - 11
Wang Fuzhi2.0 - 12
Li Yuanhong1.9 - 13Gao Ming1.0
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1920s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Adolf Hitler10 decades - 2Mao 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.