← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th century - 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 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus30 - 2
Aristotle7.1 - 3
Plato7.1 - 4
Homer7.1 - 5
Augustus4.9 - 6
Johns Hopkins4.4 - 7
Cicero4.0 - 8
George Washington3.8 - 9
Socrates3.4 - 10
Virgil3.3 - 11
Abraham Lincoln2.0 - 12
Euclid1.9 - 13
Thomas Jefferson1.6 - 14
Ovid1.6 - 15
Mark Twain1.5 - 16
Plutarch1.5 - 17
Cleopatra1.4 - 18
Theodore Roosevelt1.4 - 19
Woodrow Wilson1.4 - 20
William Henry1.3 - 21
Benjamin Franklin1.3 - 22
Herodotus1.3 - 23
Charlemagne1.3 - 24
Rembrandt1.3 - 25
Euripides1.2
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Marcel Proust12 decades - 2
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry9 decades - 3
Ivan Bunin11 decades - 4
Jean Cocteau11 decades - 5
Anaïs Nin1 decades - 6
Louis-Ferdinand Céline9 decades - 7
Annie Ernaux4 decades - 8
Michel Houellebecq3 decades - 9
André Gide13 decades - 10
Aleksey Tolstoy13 decades - 11
Marguerite Duras8 decades - 12
Milan Kundera6 decades - 13
Guillaume Apollinaire12 decades - 14
Jacques Lacan7 decades - 15Romain Gary8 decades
- 16
Marc Bloch12 decades - 17
André Malraux11 decades - 18
Marcel Pagnol10 decades - 19
Marguerite Yourcenar9 decades - 20
Colettenot measured- - 21
Georges Bataille9 decades - 22
Françoise Sagan8 decades - 23
Thích Nhất Hạnhnot measured- - 24
André Breton10 decades - 25
Boris Vian8 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.