← Fame through time1917
1917
Whose working lives fell in 1917. 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 1917, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Franklin D. Roosevelt10 decades - 2
Virginia Woolf10 decades - 3
James Joyce12 decades - 4
Igor Stravinsky11 decades - 5
Wilhelm Keitel8 decades - 6
Mohammad Mosaddegh0 decades - 7
Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden0 decades - 8
Getúlio Vargas7 decades - 9
Max Born9 decades - 10
Bela Lugosi6 decades - 11
A. A. Milne10 decades - 12
Kurt von Schleicher8 decades - 13
Abdullah I of Jordan0 decades - 14
Éamon de Valera1 decades - 15
Edward Hopper10 decades - 16
Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmarknot measured- - 17
Anna Pavlova12 decades - 18
Aleksey Tolstoy13 decades - 19
Ion Antonescu5 decades - 20
Emmy Noether7 decades - 21
Lili Elbenot measured- - 22
Wilhelm, German Crown Princenot measured- - 23
John Barrymore11 decades - 24
Günther von Klugenot measured- - 25
Abd el-Krim8 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.