← 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
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 2
Woody Allen6 decades - 3
Alfred Hitchcock9 decades - 4
Walt Disney10 decades - 5
Stanley Kubrick6 decades - 6
Quentin Tarantino3 decades - 7
James Cameron7 decades - 8
David Lynch4 decades - 9
Martin Scorsese5 decades - 10
Roman Polanski6 decades - 11
George Lucas6 decades - 12
Francis Ford Coppola5 decades - 13
Orson Welles9 decades - 14
Tim Burton3 decades - 15
Hayao Miyazaki2 decades - 16
Ridley Scott4 decades - 17
Akira Kurosawa6 decades - 18
Peter Jackson6 decades - 19
Luc Besson4 decades - 20
Rob Reiner5 decades - 21
Andrei Tarkovskynot measured- - 22
Guillermo del Toro3 decades - 23
Werner Herzog6 decades - 24
Ingmar Bergman6 decades - 25
Buster Keaton10 decades - 26
Ted Turner5 decades - 27
Leni Riefenstahl9 decades - 28
Ron Howard5 decades - 29
Federico Fellini8 decades - 30
David Fincher2 decades - 31
Oliver Stone4 decades - 32
Danny Boyle2 decades - 33
Jean-Luc Godard6 decades - 34
Pedro Almodóvar4 decades - 35
Steven Soderbergh3 decades - 36
Spike Lee4 decades - 37
Terry Gilliam4 decades - 38
Bob Saget0 decades - 39
Lars von Trier3 decades - 40
Satyajit Ray6 decades - 41
Nikita Mikhalkov4 decades - 42
Jacques Cousteau5 decades - 43
Sergio Leone6 decades - 44
Kathryn Bigelow2 decades - 45
David Cronenberg4 decades - 46
Sam Raimi3 decades - 47
Ang Lee3 decades - 48
Harvey Weinstein2 decades - 49
Elia Kazan8 decades - 50
Matt Groening3 decades - 51
Alejandro González Iñárritu2 decades - 52
Wim Wenders5 decades - 53
François Truffaut7 decades - 54
John Fordnot measured- - 55
Billy Wilder8 decades - 56
Brian De Palma4 decades - 57
Alfonso Cuarón3 decades - 58
Sydney Pollack5 decades - 59
John Huston12 decades - 60
Nora Ephron5 decades - 61
Sidney Lumet6 decades - 62
John Carpenternot measured- - 63
Sergei Eisenstein9 decades - 64
Steve Bannon1 decades - 65
Michael Moore5 decades - 66
Jim Henson4 decades - 67
Luis Buñuel8 decades - 68
Joss Whedon2 decades - 69
Vittorio De Sica9 decades - 70
Roland Emmerich3 decades - 71
Chris Columbus2 decades - 72
Wes Craven3 decades - 73
Jim Jarmusch3 decades - 74
Kris Jenner0 decades - 75
Robert Altman5 decades - 76
Roberto Rossellini8 decades - 77
Bernardo Bertolucci6 decades - 78
Miloš Forman0 decades - 79
Bob Fosse5 decades - 80
Frank Capra9 decades - 81
Terrence Malick2 decades - 82
Mira Nairnot measured- - 83
Paul Verhoeven8 decades - 84
Mike Nichols6 decades - 85
Tony Scott6 decades - 86
Fritz Lang9 decades - 87
Roger Vadim7 decades - 88
Aaron Sorkin2 decades - 89
Cecil B. DeMille10 decades - 90
Wong Kar-wai3 decades - 91
Takeshi Kitano0 decades - 92
Gus Van Sant3 decades - 93
John Cassavetes6 decades - 94
Richard Linklater2 decades - 95
Michael Mann5 decades - 96
Frank Oz2 decades - 97
Luchino Visconti12 decades - 98
Michelangelo Antonioni8 decades - 99
Alejandro Jodorowsky6 decades - 100
Rainer Werner Fassbinder5 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.