← Fame through time1970-1979
The 1970s
Whose names filled the books of the 1970s - 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 German books during the 1970s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Thomas Mann14 - 2
Karl Marx12 - 3
Novalis7.6 - 4
Friedrich Engels6.9 - 5
Jean Paul6.2 - 6
Heinrich Mann5.0 - 7
Max Weber3.6 - 8
Rosa Luxemburg3.6 - 9
Willy Brandt3.6 - 10
Erich Honecker3.5 - 11
Bertolt Brecht3.2 - 12
Heinrich Heine3.1 - 13
Anna Seghers2.8 - 14
Karl Kraus2.7 - 15
Maria Theresa2.5 - 16
Helmut Schmidt2.5 - 17
Walter Ulbricht2.5 - 18
Friedrich Schlegel2.4 - 19
Adolf Hitler2.4 - 20
Richard Wagner2.4 - 21
Paracelsus2.1 - 22
Martin Luther2.0 - 23
Karl Liebknecht2.0 - 24
Hermann Hesse1.9 - 25
Konrad Adenauer1.9
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1970s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Pope Francisnot measured- - 2
Joe Biden4 decades - 3
Elvis Presley7 decades - 4
Bob Dylan6 decades - 5
Ali Khamenei4 decades - 6
Bruce Lee5 decades - 7
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 8
John Lennon6 decades - 9
Muhammad Ali8 decades - 10
Saddam Hussein6 decades - 11
Paul McCartney6 decades - 12
Muammar Gaddafi2 decades - 13
Robert De Niro5 decades - 14
Woody Allen6 decades - 15
Pelé3 decades - 16
Al Pacino5 decades - 17
Jack Nicholson5 decades - 18
Bernie Sanders3 decades - 19
Harrison Ford4 decades - 20
Morgan Freeman3 decades - 21
George Harrisonnot measured- - 22
Chuck Norris4 decades - 23
Jane Fonda6 decades - 24
Jimi Hendrix5 decades - 25
14th Dalai Lamanot measured- - 26
Jim Morrison5 decades - 27
Anthony Hopkins5 decades - 28
Martin Scorsese5 decades - 29
Ringo Starr5 decades - 30
Dick Cheney4 decades - 31
Tina Turner5 decades - 32
Barbra Streisand6 decades - 33
Robert Redford5 decades - 34
George Lucas6 decades - 35
Amitabh Bachchan4 decades - 36
Hu Jintao6 decades - 37
Aretha Franklin6 decades - 38
Michael Douglas5 decades - 39
Joan Baez6 decades - 40
Dustin Hoffman6 decades - 41
Mick Jagger5 decades - 42
Julie Andrews7 decades - 43
Jon Voight5 decades - 44
Francis Ford Coppola5 decades - 45
Nancy Pelosi3 decades - 46
John McCain4 decades - 47
Alain Delon6 decades - 48
Alex Ferguson2 decades - 49
Donald Sutherland7 decades - 50
Frank Zappa5 decades - 51
Mario Vargas Llosa7 decades - 52
Hayao Miyazaki2 decades - 53
Silvio Berlusconi6 decades - 54
José Mujica4 decades - 55
Ian McKellen4 decades - 56
Janis Joplin5 decades - 57
Ridley Scott4 decades - 58
Bobby Fischer6 decades - 59
Danny DeVito3 decades - 60
Salman of Saudi Arabia0 decades - 61
Rajiv Gandhi4 decades - 62
Diana Ross5 decades - 63
Ben Kingsley4 decades - 64
Bill Cosby6 decades - 65
Sergio Mattarella4 decades - 66
George Carlin5 decades - 67
Ted Kaczynski2 decades - 68
Vladimir Vysotsky5 decades - 69
Julio Iglesias8 decades - 70
John Kerry4 decades - 71
Valentina Tereshkova6 decades - 72
Larry Ellison3 decades - 73
Claudia Cardinale6 decades - 74
Keith Richards4 decades - 75
Margaret Atwood5 decades - 76
Luciano Pavarotti5 decades - 77
Marvin Gaye5 decades - 78
Malcolm McDowell5 decades - 79
Slobodan Milošević2 decades - 80
Ian McShane0 decades - 81
Patrick Stewart4 decades - 82
Mitch McConnell4 decades - 83
Martin Sheen5 decades - 84
John Major8 decades - 85
Warren Beatty6 decades - 86
Burt Reynolds5 decades - 87
Christopher Walken4 decades - 88
Jimmy Page3 decades - 89
Werner Herzog6 decades - 90
Richard Dawkins4 decades - 91
Catherine Deneuve6 decades - 92
Roger Ebert4 decades - 93
Pervez Musharraf2 decades - 94
Natalie Wood7 decades - 95
Michael Crichton5 decades - 96
John Cleese4 decades - 97
Muhammad Yunus3 decades - 98
Ted Turner5 decades - 99
Colin Powell4 decades - 100
James Caan5 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.