← Fame through time1926
1926
Whose working lives fell in 1926. 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 1926, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Erwin Rommel8 decades - 2
Mikhail Bulgakov8 decades - 3
Antonio Gramsci9 decades - 4
Karl Dönitz8 decades - 5
Rudolph Valentino10 decades - 6
Sergei Prokofiev9 decades - 7
Henry Miller13 decades - 8
Edith Stein10 decades - 9
Max Ernst12 decades - 10
Rafael Trujillo9 decades - 11
Walter Model3 decades - 12
Fumimaro Konoenot measured- - 13
Cole Porter9 decades - 14
Genrikh Yagodanot measured- - 15
Edward Bernaysnot measured- - 16
Osip Mandelstamnot measured- - 17
Zora Neale Hurston6 decades - 18
Tadamichi Kuribayashinot measured- - 19
Otto Dix10 decades - 20
Earl Warrennot measured- - 21
Frank Costellonot measured- - 22
B. R. Ambedkar8 decades - 23
Helmuth Weidlingnot measured- - 24
Fritz Todtnot measured- - 25
Ilya Ehrenburg10 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.