← Fame through time1940-1949
The 1940s
Whose names filled the books of the 1940s - 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 English books during the 1940s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus22 - 2
Homer8.3 - 3
Plato7.2 - 4
Aristotle6.7 - 5
George Washington4.5 - 6
Johns Hopkins4.2 - 7
Augustus4.0 - 8
Cicero3.5 - 9
Virgil3.4 - 10
Socrates2.8 - 11
Abraham Lincoln2.8 - 12
Thomas Jefferson2.2 - 13
Euclid2.1 - 14
Woodrow Wilson1.9 - 15
Theodore Roosevelt1.8 - 16
Benjamin Franklin1.7 - 17
Mark Twain1.6 - 18
Winston Churchill1.6 - 19
Ovid1.5 - 20
Pocahontas1.4
- 21
William Henry1.3 - 22
Euripides1.1 - 23
Rembrandt1.1 - 24
Cleopatra1.1 - 25
Plutarch1.1
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1940s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ronald Reagan9 decades - 2
Richard Nixon8 decades - 3
Frida Kahlo8 decades - 4
Lyndon B. Johnson8 decades - 5
Alan Turing4 decades - 6
Gerald Ford6 decades - 7
Anne Frank7 decades - 8
Mother Teresa9 decades - 9
Leonid Brezhnev7 decades - 10
John Wayne9 decades - 11
Albert Camus8 decades - 12
Pope John Paul I2 decades - 13
Katharine Hepburn9 decades - 14
Rosa Parks6 decades - 15
Ayn Rand3 decades - 16
James Stewartnot measured- - 17
Adolf Eichmann8 decades - 18
Hedy Lamarr3 decades - 19
Bette Davis9 decades - 20
Wernher von Braun7 decades - 21
Hannah Arendt8 decades - 22
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 23
Ian Fleming7 decades - 24
Vivien Leigh8 decades - 25
Akira Kurosawa6 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.