← Fame through time1930-1939
The 1930s
Whose names filled the books of the 1930s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in French books during the 1930s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire20 - 2
Louis XIV of France16 - 3
Molière12 - 4
Victor Hugo11 - 5
Stendhal8.5 - 6
Louis XVI of France6.8 - 7
Louis XV of France6.4 - 8
François Fénelon4.8 - 9
Montesquieu4.8 - 10
Napoleon III4.4 - 11
Joan of Arc3.5 - 12
George Sand3.1 - 13
Louis XVIII of France3.1 - 14
Anatole France2.6 - 15
Marie Antoinette2.6 - 16
Léon Blum2.6 - 17
Vincent de Paul2.5 - 18
Francis de Sales2.3 - 19
Charles X of France2.1 - 20
Auguste Comte2.1 - 21
Paul Valéry1.9 - 22
Marcel Proust1.8 - 23
Louis XII of France1.8 - 24
Jules Ferry1.7 - 25
Benjamin Constant1.6
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1930s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 2
Alfred Hitchcock9 decades - 3
Walt Disney10 decades - 4
J. Robert Oppenheimer8 decades - 5
Ruhollah Khomeini5 decades - 6
George VI10 decades - 7
Joseph Goebbels9 decades - 8
George Orwell9 decades - 9
Heinrich Himmler9 decades - 10
Hirohito10 decades - 11
Deng Xiaoping11 decades - 12
Amelia Earhart10 decades - 13
Salvador Dalí10 decades - 14
Al Capone9 decades - 15
C. S. Lewis10 decades - 16
Cary Grant9 decades - 17
Marlene Dietrich9 decades - 18
Humphrey Bogart9 decades - 19
Georgy Zhukov6 decades - 20
Louis Armstrong9 decades - 21
Pope Paul VI6 decades - 22
Bing Crosby9 decades - 23
Clark Gable9 decades - 24
Werner Heisenberg10 decades - 25
John Steinbeck9 decades - 26
F. Scott Fitzgerald10 decades - 27
Vladimir Nabokov7 decades - 28
Federico García Lorca10 decades - 29
Jorge Luis Borges11 decades - 30
Lavrentiy Beria7 decades - 31
Reinhard Heydrich8 decades - 32
Golda Meir8 decades - 33
Fred Astaire9 decades - 34
Gary Cooper9 decades - 35
William Faulkner10 decades - 36
Babe Ruth10 decades - 37
John von Neumann4 decades - 38
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry9 decades - 39
Pablo Neruda10 decades - 40
Bertolt Brecht10 decades - 41
Buster Keaton10 decades - 42
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother6 decades - 43
Zhou Enlai11 decades - 44
Ansel Adams9 decades - 45
Charles Lindbergh10 decades - 46
Leni Riefenstahl9 decades - 47
Anthony Eden9 decades - 48
Dr. Seuss9 decades - 49
Martin Bormann8 decades - 50
Spencer Tracy9 decades - 51
Subhas Chandra Bose9 decades - 52
Enrico Fermi10 decades - 53
Fulgencio Batista9 decades - 54
Juan Perón3 decades - 55
Wallis Simpson4 decades - 56
Sukarno9 decades - 57
Enzo Ferrari10 decades - 58
Jiddu Krishnamurti1 decades - 59
Graham Greene9 decades - 60
Georgy Malenkov4 decades - 61
James Cagney9 decades - 62
Erich Maria Remarque10 decades - 63
Bob Hope9 decades - 64
J. Edgar Hoover9 decades - 65
Jean Harlow9 decades - 66
Karl Popper7 decades - 67
René Magritte8 decades - 68
Gloria Swanson10 decades - 69
Enid Blyton8 decades - 70
Umberto II of Italynot measured- - 71
Langston Hughes10 decades - 72
Duke Ellington9 decades - 73
Irène Joliot-Curie8 decades - 74
Friedrich Hayek0 decades - 75
Jean Gabin9 decades - 76
Anaïs Nin1 decades - 77
Paul Dirac3 decades - 78
George Gershwinnot measured- - 79
Sergei Eisenstein9 decades - 80
Konstantin Rokossovsky5 decades - 81
Theodor W. Adorno8 decades - 82
Morarji Desai7 decades - 83
Luis Buñuel8 decades - 84
Vittorio De Sica9 decades - 85
Linus Pauling9 decades - 86
Lal Bahadur Shastri7 decades - 87
M. C. Escher2 decades - 88
Ray Kroc4 decades - 89
Rudolf Höss7 decades - 90
Robert Johnsonnot measured- - 91
Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burmanot measured- - 92
Mark Rothko6 decades - 93
Glenn Miller9 decades - 94
Ernst Jünger10 decades - 95
Leopold III of Belgium1 decades - 96
Hans Frank12 decades - 97
Frank Capra9 decades - 98
Jacques Lacan7 decades - 99
Jean Piaget10 decades - 100
Ludwig Erhard8 decades
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.