← 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 French books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire23 - 2
Louis XIV of France15 - 3
Molière12 - 4
Stendhal10 - 5
Victor Hugo9.4 - 6
Louis XVI of France7.0 - 7
Montesquieu6.4 - 8
Louis XV of France6.2 - 9
François Fénelon4.6 - 10
Joan of Arc4.0 - 11
Napoleon III3.6 - 12
George Sand3.4 - 13
Louis XVIII of France3.1 - 14
François Mitterrand2.3 - 15
Pierre de Marivaux2.2 - 16
Anatole France2.2 - 17
Marie Antoinette2.1 - 18
Francis de Sales2.0 - 19
André Gide1.9 - 20
Léon Blum1.9 - 21
Jacques Chirac1.8 - 22
Charles X of France1.8 - 23
Paul Valéry1.7 - 24
Auguste Comte1.7 - 25
Marcel Proust1.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
J. R. R. Tolkien7 decades - 2
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 3
Stephen King8 decades - 4
Anne Frank7 decades - 5
Franz Kafka11 decades - 6
Agatha Christie10 decades - 7
Helen Keller14 decades - 8
George Orwell9 decades - 9
Amelia Earhart10 decades - 10
Michelle Obama2 decades - 11
George R. R. Martin1 decades - 12
Virginia Woolf10 decades - 13
C. S. Lewis10 decades - 14
Roald Dahl6 decades - 15
Gabriel García Márquez7 decades - 16
Isaac Asimov7 decades - 17
Salman Rushdie4 decades - 18
Ayn Rand3 decades - 19
Mario Vargas Llosa7 decades - 20
Thomas Mann12 decades - 21
Sylvia Plath6 decades - 22
Stan Lee3 decades - 23
H. P. Lovecraft6 decades - 24
Rudyard Kipling13 decades - 25
Ian Fleming7 decades - 26
John Steinbeck9 decades - 27
James Joyce12 decades - 28
Sergei Yesenin11 decades - 29
F. Scott Fitzgerald10 decades - 30
Maya Angelou5 decades - 31
Rajneesh3 decades - 32
Vladimir Nabokov7 decades - 33
Federico García Lorca10 decades - 34
Yukio Mishima6 decades - 35
Jorge Luis Borges11 decades - 36
George S. Patton8 decades - 37
Neil Gaiman2 decades - 38
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn6 decades - 39
Haruki Murakami2 decades - 40
Truman Capote8 decades - 41
H. G. Wells16 decades - 42
Kurt Vonnegut6 decades - 43
Margaret Atwood5 decades - 44
Arthur Miller11 decades - 45
Pier Paolo Pasolini8 decades - 46Marcel Proust12 decades
- 47
Mikhail Bulgakov8 decades - 48
T. S. Eliot11 decades - 49
William Faulkner10 decades - 50
Dan Brown3 decades - 51
Aldous Huxley10 decades - 52
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry9 decades - 53
Aleister Crowley7 decades - 54
Pablo Neruda10 decades - 55
Bertolt Brecht10 decades - 56
Hermann Hesse12 decades - 57
Roger Ebert4 decades - 58
Toni Morrison5 decades - 59
Ursula K. Le Guin5 decades - 60
Michael Crichton5 decades - 61
Charles Lindbergh10 decades - 62
Philip K. Dick5 decades - 63
Vladimir Mayakovsky11 decades - 64
Jack Kerouac6 decades - 65
Kazuo Ishiguro3 decades - 66
Arthur C. Clarke7 decades - 67
Charles Bukowski5 decades - 68
Dr. Seuss9 decades - 69
Jack London12 decades - 70
Samuel Beckett7 decades - 71
J. D. Salinger7 decades - 72
Terry Pratchett3 decades - 73
Rainer Maria Rilke12 decades - 74
Christopher Hitchens4 decades - 75
Tennessee Williams8 decades - 76
Robert Zemeckis3 decades - 77
James Baldwin10 decades - 78
Harper Lee7 decades - 79
Robert Frost13 decades - 80
Thomas Pynchon5 decades - 81
Ray Bradbury7 decades - 82
Cormac McCarthy3 decades - 83
Stefan Zweig12 decades - 84
Arundhati Roy3 decades - 85
Douglas Adams4 decades - 86
W. B. Yeats12 decades - 87
Allen Ginsberg7 decades - 88
Anna Akhmatova11 decades - 89
Joseph Brodsky5 decades - 90
Umberto Eco7 decades - 91
Ezra Pound11 decades - 92
Tom Clancy4 decades - 93
William S. Burroughs5 decades - 94
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 95
Graham Greene9 decades - 96
Beatrix Potter10 decades - 97
Frank Herbertnot measured- - 98
John le Carré2 decades - 99
Elie Wiesel6 decades - 100
Laura Bush2 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.