← Fame through time1939
1939
Whose working lives fell in 1939. 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 1939, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
J. Robert Oppenheimer8 decades - 2
Salvador Dalí10 decades - 3
Pablo Neruda10 decades - 4
Cary Grant9 decades - 5
Reinhard Heydrich8 decades - 6
Graham Greene9 decades - 7
Jean Gabin9 decades - 8
Umberto II of Italy7 decades - 9
Dr. Seuss9 decades - 10
Peter Lorre9 decades - 11
B. F. Skinner5 decades - 12
Glenn Miller9 decades - 13
Johnny Weissmuller0 decades - 14
Joseph Campbell12 decades - 15
John Gielgud9 decades - 16
Lal Bahadur Shastri7 decades - 17
Kurt Georg Kiesinger7 decades - 18
J. R. D. Tatanot measured- - 19
Alexei Kosygin6 decades - 20
Isaac Bashevis Singer6 decades - 21
Dolores del Río0 decades - 22
Greer Garson8 decades - 23
Luis Carrero Blanconot measured- - 24
Count Basie8 decades - 25
Ève Curienot 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.