← Fame through time1930-1939
The 1930s
Whose names filled the books of the 1930s - 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 1930s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus25 - 2
Homer8.8 - 3
Plato7.5 - 4
Aristotle6.8 - 5
Augustus6.2 - 6
George Washington6.0 - 7
Cicero4.8 - 8
Johns Hopkins4.6 - 9
Virgil4.0 - 10
Socrates3.6 - 11
Abraham Lincoln2.5 - 12
Euclid2.3 - 13
Theodore Roosevelt1.9 - 14
Mark Twain1.9 - 15
Ovid1.8 - 16
Thomas Jefferson1.8 - 17
Benjamin Franklin1.8 - 18
Plutarch1.7 - 19
Cleopatra1.7 - 20
Woodrow Wilson1.6 - 21
William Henry1.6 - 22
Pocahontas1.5
- 23
J. P. Morgan1.5 - 24
Euripides1.4 - 25
Herodotus1.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1930s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 2
Alfred Hitchcock9 decades - 3
Walt Disney10 decades - 4
J. Robert Oppenheimer8 decades - 5
Ruhollah Khomeini5 decades - 6
George VI10 decades - 7
Joseph Goebbels9 decades - 8
George Orwell9 decades - 9
Heinrich Himmler9 decades - 10
Hirohito10 decades - 11
Deng Xiaoping11 decades - 12
Amelia Earhart10 decades - 13
Salvador Dalí10 decades - 14
Al Capone9 decades - 15
C. S. Lewis10 decades - 16
Cary Grant9 decades - 17
Marlene Dietrich9 decades - 18
Humphrey Bogart9 decades - 19
Georgy Zhukov6 decades - 20
Louis Armstrong9 decades - 21
Pope Paul VI6 decades - 22
Bing Crosby9 decades - 23
Clark Gable9 decades - 24
Werner Heisenberg10 decades - 25
John Steinbeck9 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.