← 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 - 26
Michael Caine6 decades - 27
Roman Polanski6 decades - 28
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis4 decades - 29
Grace Kelly7 decades - 30
Paul Newman7 decades - 31
Robert F. Kennedy7 decades - 32
George Soros3 decades - 33
Charles Manson5 decades - 34
Idi Amin5 decades - 35
Gabriel García Márquez7 decades - 36
David Attenborough5 decades - 37
Robert Duvall5 decades - 38
Yoko Ono5 decades - 39
Maggie Smith6 decades - 40
Buzz Aldrin3 decades - 41
Christopher Plummer7 decades - 42
Yasser Arafat5 decades - 43
Gene Hackman5 decades - 44
Rupert Murdoch5 decades - 45
Patrice Lumumba8 decades - 46
Jacques Chirac8 decades - 47
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam0 decades - 48
Leonard Cohen5 decades - 49
Judi Dench5 decades - 50
Sylvia Plath6 decades - 51
Shirley MacLaine6 decades - 52
Carl Sagan6 decades - 53
Jiang Zemin9 decades - 54
Richard Burtonnot measured- - 55
Gene Wilder5 decades - 56
Roger Moore7 decades - 57
Ray Charles7 decades - 58
Shirley Templenot measured- - 59
Raúl Castro9 decades - 60
Peter O'Toole6 decades - 61
Maya Angelou5 decades - 62
Rajneesh3 decades - 63
Akihito8 decades - 64
James Brownnot measured- - 65
Miles Davis7 decades - 66
Manmohan Singh5 decades - 67
Yukio Mishima6 decades - 68
Mel Brooks5 decades - 69
Gloria Steinem5 decades - 70
Michel Foucault8 decades - 71
William Shatner5 decades - 72
Steve McQueen6 decades - 73
Sidney Poitier7 decades - 74
John Forbes Nash Jr.0 decades - 75
Leslie Nielsen5 decades - 76
Jean-Marie Le Pen8 decades - 77
Andrei Tarkovskynot measured- - 78
Chuck Berry6 decades - 79
Giorgio Armani5 decades - 80
Tony Curtis7 decades - 81
John Williamsnot measured- - 82
Lee Harvey Oswald6 decades - 83
Anne Bancroft7 decades - 84
Debbie Reynolds7 decades - 85
Quincy Jones7 decades - 86
Toni Morrison5 decades - 87
Ursula K. Le Guin5 decades - 88
Ruth Bader Ginsburg4 decades - 89
Bhumibol Adulyadej5 decades - 90
Angela Lansbury6 decades - 91
Lev Yashinnot measured- - 92
Philip K. Dick5 decades - 93
Mobutu Sese Seko5 decades - 94
Jayne Mansfield7 decades - 95
Ted Kennedy6 decades - 96
Hugh Hefner6 decades - 97
Helmut Kohl6 decades - 98
Jean-Paul Belmondo6 decades - 99
Jerry Lewis7 decades - 100
Leonard Nimoy5 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.