← 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 Chinese books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong275 - 2
Lu Xun60 - 3
Liu Shaoqi58 - 4
Zhou Enlai55 - 5
Lin Biao40 - 6
Deng Xiaoping34 - 7
Sun Yat-sen31 - 8
Jiang Zemin13 - 9
Confucius12 - 10
Jiang Qing10 - 11
Zhu De9.6 - 12
Cao Xueqin5.9 - 13
Li Peng5.4 - 14
Lee Teng-hui5.2 - 15
Yuan Shikai5.0 - 16
Laozi4.7 - 17
Lin Yutang4.6 - 18
Soong Ching-ling4.4 - 19Gao Ming3.4
- 20
Zhuang Zhou2.8 - 21
Li Bai2.3 - 22
Kang Youwei2.3 - 23
Li Hongzhang2.0 - 24Wang Chong1.9
- 25
Wang Anshi1.7
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
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.