← 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
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 2
Stephen King8 decades - 3
Helen Keller14 decades - 4
Amelia Earhart10 decades - 5
Michelle Obama2 decades - 6
George R. R. Martin1 decades - 7
Isaac Asimov7 decades - 8
Ayn Rand3 decades - 9
Thomas Mann12 decades - 10
Sylvia Plath6 decades - 11
Stan Lee3 decades - 12
H. P. Lovecraft6 decades - 13
John Steinbeck9 decades - 14
F. Scott Fitzgerald10 decades - 15
Maya Angelou5 decades - 16
Vladimir Nabokov7 decades - 17
George S. Patton8 decades - 18
Truman Capote8 decades - 19
Kurt Vonnegut6 decades - 20
Arthur Miller11 decades - 21
T. S. Eliot11 decades - 22
William Faulkner10 decades - 23
Dan Brown3 decades - 24
Roger Ebert4 decades - 25
Toni Morrison5 decades - 26
Ursula K. Le Guin5 decades - 27
Michael Crichton5 decades - 28
Charles Lindbergh10 decades - 29
Philip K. Dick5 decades - 30
Jack Kerouac6 decades - 31
Dr. Seuss9 decades - 32
Jack London12 decades - 33
J. D. Salinger7 decades - 34
Tennessee Williams8 decades - 35
Robert Zemeckis3 decades - 36
James Baldwin10 decades - 37
Harper Lee7 decades - 38
Robert Frost13 decades - 39
Thomas Pynchon5 decades - 40
Ray Bradbury7 decades - 41
Cormac McCarthy3 decades - 42
Allen Ginsberg7 decades - 43
Joseph Brodsky5 decades - 44
Ezra Pound11 decades - 45
Tom Clancy4 decades - 46
William S. Burroughs5 decades - 47
Frank Herbertnot measured- - 48
Elie Wiesel6 decades - 49
Laura Bush2 decades - 50
Jim Lovell3 decades - 51
Gore Vidal7 decades - 52
Robert A. Heinlein7 decades - 53
John Grisham3 decades - 54
Julia Child6 decades - 55
Anne Rice3 decades - 56
Eugene O'Neill10 decades - 57
Isabel Allende4 decades - 58
David Copperfieldnot measured- - 59
Langston Hughes10 decades - 60
Susan Sontag6 decades - 61
Isadora Duncannot measured- - 62
Sam Shepard5 decades - 63
Laura Ingalls Wilder8 decades - 64
Gertrude Stein10 decades - 65
Mario Puzo5 decades - 66
L. Ron Hubbard6 decades - 67
Philip Roth6 decades - 68
Martha Stewart4 decades - 69
Alice Walker8 decades - 70
Suzanne Collins1 decades - 71
Norman Mailer8 decades - 72
Ray Kroc4 decades - 73
J. Paul Getty8 decades - 74
Svetlana Alliluyeva1 decades - 75
David Foster Wallace2 decades - 76
Caroline Kennedy3 decades - 77
Henry Millernot measured- - 78
Anton LaVey2 decades - 79
Timothy Leary6 decades - 80Dale Carnegie9 decades
- 81
Raymond Chandler8 decades - 82
bell hooks3 decades - 83
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Sinclair Lewis11 decades - 84
Joan Didion5 decades - 85
Gene Roddenberry4 decades - 86
Chuck Palahniuk2 decades - 87
Tony Robbins2 decades - 88
Edgar Rice Burroughs11 decades - 89
Robert Kiyosaki1 decades - 90
David Rockefeller7 decades - 91
Pearl S. Buck9 decades - 92
Upton Sinclair12 decades - 93
William Gibsonnot measured- - 94
Paul Auster3 decades - 95
Dorothy Parker10 decades - 96
Betty Ford5 decades - 97
Joseph Campbell12 decades - 98
Napoleon Hill3 decades - 99
Ken Kesey6 decades - 100
Coretta Scott King5 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.