← 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 Italian books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Giotto5.4 - 2
Dante Alighieri5.0 - 3
Caravaggio3.8 - 4
Leonardo da Vinci3.8 - 5
Antonio da Correggio3.7 - 6
Benedetto Croce3.3 - 7
Donato Bramante2.9 - 8
Donatello2.8 - 9
Giuseppe Mazzini2.2 - 10
Alessandro Manzoni2.2 - 11
Ugo Foscolo2.1 - 12
Pietro Perugino2.0 - 13
Tintoretto1.9 - 14
Francis of Assisi1.8 - 15
Giacomo Leopardi1.8 - 16
Benito Mussolini1.8 - 17
Torquato Tasso1.7 - 18
Masaccio1.7 - 19
Giordano Bruno1.6 - 20
Lorenzo de' Medici1.6 - 21
Galileo Galilei1.6 - 22
Charles Borromeo1.6 - 23
Giosuè Carducci1.5 - 24
Marco Polo1.4 - 25
Giuseppe Verdi1.4
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 - 46
Marcel 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.