← Fame through time1940
1940
Whose working lives fell in 1940. 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 1940, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 2
Ayn Rand3 decades - 3
Joan Crawford10 decades - 4
Henry Fonda9 decades - 5
Greta Garbo10 decades - 6
Albert Speer9 decades - 7
Howard Hughes9 decades - 8
Viktor Frankl6 decades - 9
Christian Dior8 decades - 10
Dag Hammarskjöld7 decades - 11
Robert Wadlow0 decades - 12
Simo Häyhä0 decades - 13
Fred Trumpnot measured- - 14
Clara Bow10 decades - 15
Mikhail Sholokhov9 decades - 16
Myrna Loynot measured- - 17
Elias Canetti4 decades - 18
Joseph Cottennot measured- - 19
Otto Preminger5 decades - 20
Dalton Trumbonot measured- - 21
Max Schmelingnot measured- - 22
Arthur Koestler8 decades - 23
Gertrude Ederlenot measured- - 24
Guillermo Stábilenot measured- - 25
Major Dhyan Chand Singhnot 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.