← Fame through time1897
1897
Whose working lives fell in 1897. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in 1897, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Gustav Klimt12 decades - 2
Claude Debussy12 decades - 3
Thérèse of Lisieux10 decades - 4
David Hilbert14 decades - 5
Edith Wharton13 decades - 6
O. Henry14 decades - 7
Pyotr Stolypin6 decades - 8
Gerhart Hauptmann13 decades - 9
Arthur Schnitzler14 decades - 10
Aristide Briand12 decades - 11
Emilio Salgari13 decades - 12
Ida B. Wells6 decades - 13
Maurice Maeterlinck13 decades - 14
Maurice Barrès14 decades - 15
Hilma af Klint0 decades - 16
Philipp Lenard11 decades - 17
Nikolai Yudenich1 decades - 18
J. Bruce Ismay1 decades - 19
Billy Hughes3 decades - 20
Niko Pirosmani6 decades - 21
Victoria of Baden0 decades - 22
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodonnot measured- - 23
William Henry Bragg0 decades - 24
Georges Feydeau14 decades - 25
Mikhail Nesterov8 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. 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. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.