← Fame through time1934
1934
Whose working lives fell in 1934. 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 1934, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ernest Hemingway10 decades - 2
Alfred Hitchcock9 decades - 3
Al Capone9 decades - 4
Jorge Luis Borges11 decades - 5
Vladimir Nabokov7 decades - 6
Humphrey Bogart9 decades - 7
Fred Astaire9 decades - 8
Lavrentiy Beria7 decades - 9
James Cagney9 decades - 10
Gloria Swanson10 decades - 11
Yasunari Kawabata1 decades - 12
Friedrich Hayek0 decades - 13
Duke Ellington9 decades - 14
Frederick IX of Denmark0 decades - 15
Charles Laughton9 decades - 16
Noël Coward5 decades - 17
John Dillingernot measured- - 18
Erich Kästner10 decades - 19
Jean Moulinnot measured- - 20
Adnan Menderes4 decades - 21
P. L. Travers0 decades - 22
George Cukor9 decades - 23
Leo Strauss8 decades - 24
Charles Boyer10 decades - 25
Emma Moranonot measured-
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.