← 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
Donald Trump4 decades - 2
Michael Jackson5 decades - 3
Barack Obama2 decades - 4
John F. Kennedy11 decades - 5
Joe Biden4 decades - 6
George W. Bush4 decades - 7
Elvis Presley7 decades - 8
Franklin D. Roosevelt10 decades - 9
Ronald Reagan9 decades - 10
Steve Jobs4 decades - 11
Bob Dylan6 decades - 12
Bill Clinton4 decades - 13
Pope Leo XIV0 decades - 14
Marilyn Monroe7 decades - 15
Madonnanot measured- - 16
Jimmy Carter7 decades - 17
Martin Luther King Jr.6 decades - 18
Bruce Lee5 decades - 19
Robin Williams7 decades - 20
George H. W. Bush2 decades - 21
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 22
Bill Gates4 decades - 23
Richard Nixon8 decades - 24
Brad Pitt3 decades - 25
Dwight D. Eisenhower9 decades - 26
Muhammad Ali8 decades - 27
Michael Jordan4 decades - 28
Robert De Niro5 decades - 29
Clint Eastwood6 decades - 30
Kamala Harris1 decades - 31
Lyndon B. Johnson8 decades - 32
Jackie Channot measured- - 33
Judy Garland9 decades - 34
Johnny Depp3 decades - 35
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 36
Tom Cruise4 decades - 37
Marlon Brando7 decades - 38
Tom Hanks4 decades - 39
Tupac Shakur3 decades - 40
Meryl Streep4 decades - 41
Harry S. Truman9 decades - 42
Woody Allen6 decades - 43
Dolly Parton5 decades - 44
Gerald Ford6 decades - 45
Whitney Houston4 decades - 46
Al Pacino5 decades - 47
Stephen King8 decades - 48
Walt Disney10 decades - 49
J. Robert Oppenheimer8 decades - 50
Sandra Bullock3 decades - 51
Sylvester Stallone5 decades - 52
Frank Sinatra8 decades - 53
Warren Buffett3 decades - 54
Jim Carrey3 decades - 55
Stanley Kubrick6 decades - 56
George Clooney3 decades - 57
Jack Nicholson5 decades - 58
Bruce Willis4 decades - 59
Jeff Bezos2 decades - 60
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 61
Helen Keller14 decades - 62
Nicolas Cage3 decades - 63
Malcolm X6 decades - 64
Kurt Cobain3 decades - 65
Quentin Tarantino3 decades - 66
Neil Armstrong6 decades - 67
Bernie Sanders3 decades - 68
Harrison Ford4 decades - 69
Morgan Freeman3 decades - 70
Chernot measured- - 71
Mel Gibson4 decades - 72
Demi Moore3 decades - 73
Chuck Norris4 decades - 74
Noam Chomsky6 decades - 75
Jane Fonda6 decades - 76
John Travolta5 decades - 77
Andy Warhol6 decades - 78
Johnny Cash6 decades - 79
Jimi Hendrix5 decades - 80
Selenanot measured- - 81
Jim Morrison5 decades - 82
Anthony Hopkins5 decades - 83
David Lynch4 decades - 84
Martin Scorsese5 decades - 85
Henry Kissinger7 decades - 86
Denzel Washington3 decades - 87
Jodie Foster4 decades - 88
Sigourney Weaver4 decades - 89
Bruce Springsteen5 decades - 90
Dick Cheney4 decades - 91
Boris Johnson2 decades - 92
Kevin Costner3 decades - 93
John Wayne9 decades - 94
Tina Turner5 decades - 95
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis4 decades - 96
Diane Keaton5 decades - 97
Amelia Earhart10 decades - 98
Barbra Streisand6 decades - 99
Eddie Murphy4 decades - 100
Katharine Hepburn9 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.