← Fame through time1950-1959
The 1950s
Whose names filled the books of the 1950s - 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 1950s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus25 - 2
Aristotle8.6 - 3
Plato8.2 - 4
Homer7.7 - 5
Augustus4.2 - 6
Cicero4.1 - 7
Johns Hopkins4.0 - 8
Socrates3.9 - 9
George Washington3.8 - 10
Virgil3.7 - 11
Euclid2.5 - 12
Abraham Lincoln2.2 - 13
Theodore Roosevelt1.7 - 14
Thomas Jefferson1.7 - 15
Mark Twain1.6 - 16
Woodrow Wilson1.6 - 17
Benjamin Franklin1.5 - 18
Cleopatra1.5 - 19
Ovid1.5 - 20
Plutarch1.4 - 21
Winston Churchill1.4 - 22
Henry James1.3 - 23
Euripides1.2 - 24
Charlemagne1.2 - 25
Rembrandt1.2
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1950s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
John F. Kennedy11 decades - 2
Jimmy Carter7 decades - 3
Pope John Paul II5 decades - 4
George H. W. Bush2 decades - 5
Nelson Mandela6 decades - 6
Judy Garland9 decades - 7
Marlon Brando7 decades - 8
Frank Sinatra8 decades - 9
Indira Gandhi7 decades - 10
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh0 decades - 11
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi4 decades - 12
Henry Kissinger7 decades - 13
Christopher Lee6 decades - 14
Roald Dahl6 decades - 15
Isaac Asimov7 decades - 16
Ingrid Bergman8 decades - 17
James Dean9 decades - 18
Richard Feynman4 decades - 19
Nicolae Ceaușescunot measured- - 20
Orson Welles9 decades - 21
Lee Kuan Yew7 decades - 22
Kirk Douglas8 decades - 23
Eva Perón8 decades - 24
Édith Piaf6 decades - 25
Charles Bronson5 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.