← Fame through time1960-1969
The 1960s
Whose names filled the books of the 1960s - 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 1960s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus24 - 2
Aristotle9.2 - 3
Plato8.5 - 4
Homer7.0 - 5
Johns Hopkins4.3 - 6
Augustus4.1 - 7
George Washington3.9 - 8
Cicero3.8 - 9
Socrates3.8 - 10
Virgil3.7 - 11
John F. Kennedy2.1 - 12
Mark Twain1.9 - 13
Euclid1.8 - 14
Abraham Lincoln1.7 - 15
Woodrow Wilson1.7 - 16
Thomas Jefferson1.6 - 17
Cleopatra1.6 - 18
Ovid1.6 - 19
Plutarch1.6 - 20
Sukarno1.5 - 21Ababa1.4
- 22
Theodore Roosevelt1.4 - 23
Euripides1.4 - 24
Henry James1.4 - 25
Rembrandt1.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1960s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Elizabeth II8 decades - 2
Marilyn Monroe7 decades - 3
Martin Luther King Jr.6 decades - 4
Pope Benedict XVI2 decades - 5
Che Guevara7 decades - 6
Brigitte Bardot7 decades - 7
Margaret Thatcher6 decades - 8
Clint Eastwood6 decades - 9
Mikhail Gorbachev4 decades - 10
Fidel Castro10 decades - 11
Audrey Hepburn7 decades - 12
Elizabeth Taylor9 decades - 13
Sean Connery6 decades - 14
Warren Buffett3 decades - 15
Stanley Kubrick6 decades - 16
Malcolm X6 decades - 17
Neil Armstrong6 decades - 18
Jane Goodall5 decades - 19
Noam Chomsky6 decades - 20
Yuri Gagarin6 decades - 21
Andy Warhol6 decades - 22
Johnny Cash6 decades - 23
Pol Pot5 decades - 24
Boris Yeltsin4 decades - 25
Sophia Loren7 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.