← 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 English books during the 1970s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus25 - 2
Aristotle6.3 - 3
Plato6.0 - 4
Homer4.8 - 5
Johns Hopkins4.5 - 6
George Washington3.7 - 7
Augustus3.1 - 8
Socrates2.8 - 9
Cicero2.7 - 10
Virgil2.6 - 11Ababa1.6
- 12
Thomas Jefferson1.5 - 13
John F. Kennedy1.5 - 14
Mark Twain1.4 - 15
Richard Nixon1.4 - 16
Woodrow Wilson1.4 - 17
Ovid1.3 - 18
Euclid1.3 - 19
Plutarch1.2 - 20
Abraham Lincoln1.2 - 21
Cleopatra1.1 - 22
Rembrandt1.1 - 23
Benjamin Franklin1.1 - 24
Indira Gandhi1.1 - 25
Theodore Roosevelt1.1 - 26
Henry James1.1 - 27
Brigham Young1.1 - 28
Jimmy Carter1.0 - 29
Herodotus0.99 - 30
Adam Smith0.96 - 31
John Adams0.96 - 32Liu Shao0.94
- 33
Mahatma Gandhi0.94 - 34
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.92 - 35
Ramakrishna0.91 - 36
Charlemagne0.89 - 37
Euripides0.88 - 38
Winston Churchill0.87 - 39
Galen0.83 - 40
Jawaharlal Nehru0.83 - 41
William Henry0.82 - 42
Henry Ford0.77 - 43
Solon0.77 - 44
Sophocles0.77 - 45
Ho Chi Minh0.76 - 46
John the Baptist0.76 - 47
Bede0.75 - 48
T. S. Eliot0.74 - 49
Richard II0.74 - 50
Sukarno0.73 - 51
Livy0.73 - 52
George Eliot0.71 - 53
John Smith0.71 - 54
Hadrian0.70 - 55
Thucydides0.69 - 56
Lyndon B. Johnson0.69 - 57
John Henry0.66 - 58
Ralph Nader0.66 - 59
Andrew Jackson0.66 - 60
Julius Caesar0.65 - 61
Virginia Woolf0.64 - 62
Aeschylus0.63 - 63
James Madison0.62 - 64
Jane Austen0.61 - 65
Walter Scott0.60 - 66
Pericles0.60 - 67
Walt Whitman0.59 - 68
Walt Disney0.58 - 69
Origen0.58 - 70
Aristophanes0.56 - 71
John Dewey0.54
- 72
Thomas More0.54 - 73
Jefferson Davis0.54 - 74
D. H. Lawrence0.53 - 75
John Marshall0.53 - 76
Thomas Aquinas0.53 - 77
Ahab0.52 - 78
Shivaji0.52 - 79
Charles Dickens0.52 - 80
James Joyce0.51 - 81
Alexander Hamilton0.51 - 82
William Morris0.51 - 83
Strabo0.51 - 84
James I, Count of Urgell0.51 - 85
Alexander the Great0.50 - 86
Oscar Wilde0.50 - 87
Pocahontas0.50
- 88
Herbert Hoover0.48 - 89
Xenophon0.48 - 90
Trajan0.48 - 91
Samuel Johnson0.48 - 92
John Wesley0.48 - 93
Bertrand Russell0.48 - 94
Ezra Pound0.47 - 95
Pindar0.47 - 96
Sam Houston0.47 - 97
Pythagoras0.47 - 98
John Hancock0.47 - 99
John Stuart Mill0.46 - 100
William Blake0.46
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-
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.