← Fame through time1929
1929
Whose working lives fell in 1929. 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 1929, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Nikita Khrushchev10 decades - 2
Edward VIII9 decades - 3
Aldous Huxley10 decades - 4
Rudolf Hess9 decades - 5
Harold Macmillan9 decades - 6
John Ford13 decades - 7
Maximilian Kolbe1 decades - 8
Louis-Ferdinand Céline9 decades - 9
Norman Rockwell10 decades - 10
Walter Brennan9 decades - 11
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi2 decades - 12
Georges Lemaître7 decades - 13
Dashiell Hammett9 decades - 14
Jean Renoir10 decades - 15
Edogawa Ranponot measured- - 16
Boris III of Bulgaria9 decades - 17
Alfred Kinsey5 decades - 18
Joseph Roth10 decades - 19
Dietrich von Choltitznot measured- - 20
Kōnosuke Matsushitanot measured- - 21
Satyendra Nath Bose0 decades - 22
Jack Bennynot measured- - 23
Norbert Wiener10 decades - 24
Fritz Sauckelnot measured- - 25
Bessie Smith10 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.