← Fame through timeFame through time
Famous after death: 20th century
People whose names were printed far more after they died than while they lived, ranked by the share of all their mentions in print that came after death. Measured in their own language, and counted from five years on, so the obituaries do not count.
- 1
Bruce Lee100% - 2
Valentin Serov100% - 3
Alexander Kolchak100% - 4
Ayn Rand100% - 5
Scott Joplin100% - 6
Alan Turing100% - 7
Amedeo Modigliani100% - 8
Stieg Larsson100% - 9
Mikhail Bakhtin100% - 10
Wilhelm Canaris100% - 11
Claus von Stauffenberg100% - 12
Khalil Gibran100% - 13
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa99% - 14
F. W. Murnau99% - 15
H. P. Lovecraft99% - 16
Wilfred Owen99% - 17
Jaroslav Hašek99% - 18
Rudolf Höss99% - 19
Antonio Gramsci99% - 20
Walter Benjamin99% - 21
Eva Braun99% - 22
Fernando Pessoa99% - 23
Charles Rennie Mackintosh99% - 24
Buddy Holly99% - 25
Ernst Thälmann99% - 26
Michael Curtiz99% - 27
Franz Kafka99% - 28
Sayyid Qutb99% - 29
Harvey Milk99% - 30
Rosalind Franklin98% - 31
Pompeu Fabra98% - 32
Oskar Schindler98% - 33
Álvaro Obregón98% - 34
Robert Musil98% - 35
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner98% - 36
Isaac Babel98% - 37
Piet Mondrian98% - 38
Sergei Korolev98% - 39
Alain-Fournier98% - 40
Patsy Cline98% - 41
Chiang Kai-shek98% - 42
Faina Ranevskaya98% - 43
Vladimir Vysotsky98% - 44
Edith Stein97% - 45
Richard Sorge97% - 46
Ludwig Wittgenstein97% - 47
Georg Trakl97% - 48
Kurt von Schleicher97% - 49
Lin Yutang97% - 50
August Macke97% - 51
Friedrich Ebert97% - 52
Varlam Shalamov97% - 53
Magda Goebbels97% - 54
Josef Mengele97% - 55
John von Neumann96% - 56
Erwin Rommel96% - 57
Kazimir Malevich96% - 58
Ramana Maharshi96% - 59
Anton Webern96% - 60
Freddie Mercury96% - 61
Karl Liebknecht96% - 62
Dietrich Bonhoeffer96% - 63
Sylvia Plath96% - 64
Mata Hari96% - 65
Johan Huizinga96% - 66
Padre Pio96% - 67
Lev Gumilev96% - 68
Nicholas Roerich96% - 69
Sophie Scholl96% - 70
Norbert Elias96% - 71
Paul Celan96% - 72
Paul Klee96% - 73
Rosa Luxemburg95% - 74
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin95% - 75
Else Lasker-Schüler95% - 76
Alban Berg95% - 77
Mikhail Frunze95% - 78
Nikos Kazantzakis95% - 79
Coco Chanel95% - 80
Andrei Gromyko95% - 81
Josemaría Escrivá95% - 82
Carlos Gardel95% - 83
César Vallejo95% - 84
Augusto César Sandino95% - 85
Emil Cioran95% - 86
Frantz Fanon95% - 87
Clarice Lispector95% - 88
Martin Luther King Jr.95% - 89
Abraham Maslow95% - 90
Emiliano Zapata95% - 91
Antonin Artaud95% - 92
Kurt Tucholsky95% - 93
Bertolt Brecht94% - 94
Velimir Khlebnikov94% - 95
Franz Marc94% - 96
Frida Kahlo94% - 97
Otis Redding94% - 98
Richard Feynman94% - 99
Alfred Jodl94% - 100
Teresa Teng94%
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.