← 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 - 26
Andrew Jackson1.1 - 27
John Adams1.1 - 28
John Smith1.00 - 29
Henry Ford0.99 - 30
Charlemagne0.99 - 31
John Henry0.97 - 32
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.96 - 33
Thucydides0.95 - 34
Galen0.95 - 35
Sophocles0.95 - 36
Herodotus0.93 - 37
Henry James0.93 - 38
William Penn0.91 - 39
Solon0.90 - 40
Adam Smith0.86 - 41
Cordell Hull0.85 - 42
Bede0.84 - 43
John Hancock0.83 - 44
Herbert Hoover0.81 - 45
Livy0.77 - 46
John Day0.76 - 47
Walt Whitman0.75 - 48
Alexander Hamilton0.75 - 49
Pericles0.75 - 50
Henry Clay0.75 - 51
Walter Scott0.74 - 52
Thomas Aquinas0.73 - 53
Aeschylus0.73 - 54
John Dewey0.73
- 55
Julius Caesar0.72 - 56
Brigham Young0.71 - 57
Black Hawk0.71 - 58
Jefferson Davis0.70 - 59
Osceola0.70 - 60
John Marshall0.69 - 61
Sam Houston0.69 - 62
Hippocrates0.67 - 63
Mahatma Gandhi0.67 - 64
John the Baptist0.66 - 65
Aristophanes0.66 - 66
J. P. Morgan0.64 - 67
Xenophon0.63 - 68
Harry S. Truman0.61 - 69
Paul Revere0.61 - 70
T. S. Eliot0.60 - 71
Archimedes0.60 - 72
Lucretius0.60 - 73
Charles Dickens0.60 - 74
James I, Count of Urgell0.60 - 75
Origen0.59 - 76
Patrick Henry0.59 - 77
Demosthenes0.58 - 78
Cochise0.58 - 79
Pythagoras0.58 - 80
Horace Mann0.56 - 81
Juniper0.56 - 82
George VI0.56 - 83
George V0.55 - 84
John Wesley0.55 - 85
H. G. Wells0.53 - 86
Joseph Smith0.53 - 87
Hadrian0.53 - 88
Robert E. Lee0.53 - 89
John Quincy Adams0.53 - 90
Alexander the Great0.52 - 91
James Madison0.52 - 92
Plautus0.51 - 93
Pindar0.51 - 94
George Peabody0.51 - 95
Matthew Arnold0.51 - 96
Plotinus0.51 - 97
Ben Jonson0.50 - 98
William Morris0.50 - 99Ababa0.49
- 100
Tertullian0.49
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.