← 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 - 26
Rembrandt1.3 - 27
John Smith1.3 - 28
Thomas Jefferson1.3 - 29
Walter Scott1.2 - 30
Galen1.1 - 31
Herbert Hoover1.1 - 32
Pericles1.1 - 33
Livy1.1 - 34
John Adams1.1 - 35
Solon1.1 - 36
Sophocles1.1 - 37
John Henry1.0 - 38
Julius Caesar1.0 - 39
Adam Smith1.0 - 40
Hadrian0.99 - 41
Henry James0.97 - 42
Bede0.97 - 43
Alexander Hamilton0.96 - 44
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.95 - 45
John the Baptist0.93 - 46
Andrew Jackson0.92 - 47
Aristophanes0.91 - 48
William Penn0.90 - 49
Henry Clay0.87 - 50
Demosthenes0.87 - 51
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor0.82 - 52
James I, Count of Urgell0.82 - 53
Xenophon0.82 - 54
James II, Count of Urgell0.82 - 55
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford0.81 - 56
Matthew Arnold0.81 - 57
Trajan0.81 - 58
George V0.80 - 59
Edward VII0.80 - 60
H. G. Wells0.80 - 61
Hippocrates0.79 - 62
Thucydides0.79 - 63
Lucretius0.77 - 64
Osceola0.77 - 65
Jefferson Davis0.76 - 66
Richard II0.76 - 67
Ben Jonson0.75 - 68
Bonar Law0.73 - 69
John Marshall0.72 - 70
J. P. Morgan0.72 - 71
George Eliot0.72 - 72
Pindar0.71 - 73
Black Hawk0.71 - 74
Strabo0.71 - 75
Pythagoras0.71 - 76
John Wesley0.69 - 77
Origen0.69 - 78
Leland Stanford0.69 - 79
Lord Byron0.69 - 80
Alexander the Great0.68 - 81
Herbert Spencer0.68 - 82
Charles Dickens0.68 - 83
Sulla0.67 - 84
Otho0.66 - 85
Walt Whitman0.64 - 86
Calvin Coolidge0.64 - 87
Tertullian0.63 - 88
Sappho0.63 - 89
Plautus0.62 - 90
Horace Mann0.59 - 91
William Morris0.58 - 92
Catullus0.58 - 93
John Quincy Adams0.58 - 94
Aeschylus0.58 - 95
Vespasian0.58 - 96
Hosea0.57 - 97
John Hancock0.56 - 98
Robert Louis Stevenson0.55 - 99
Sam Houston0.54 - 100
Elihu Root0.54
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.