← 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 French books during the 1940s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Voltaire19 - 2
Louis XIV of France14 - 3
Molière13 - 4
Stendhal12 - 5
Victor Hugo10 - 6
Montesquieu7.3 - 7
Louis XVI of France6.1 - 8
Louis XV of France5.6 - 9
Joan of Arc4.6 - 10
François Fénelon4.1 - 11
Louis XVIII of France3.5 - 12
Napoleon III3.4 - 13
Léon Blum3.2 - 14
George Sand3.2 - 15
Maine de Biran2.8 - 16
Paul Valéry2.6 - 17
André Gide2.6 - 18
Francis de Sales2.5 - 19
Anatole France2.3 - 20
Pierre Laval2.2 - 21
Pierre de Marivaux2.2 - 22
Léon Bloy2.1 - 23
Marcel Proust2.1 - 24
Louis XII of France2.0 - 25
Charles X of France1.9
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 - 26
Joan Crawford10 decades - 27
Yuri Andropov4 decades - 28
Henry Fonda9 decades - 29
Simone de Beauvoir8 decades - 30
Eva Braun8 decades - 31
Laurence Olivier9 decades - 32
Josef Mengele4 decades - 33
Aristotle Onassis6 decades - 34
Salvador Allende11 decades - 35
Puyi8 decades - 36
Oskar Schindler4 decades - 37
Lucille Ball8 decades - 38
Howard Hughes9 decades - 39
Greta Garbo10 decades - 40
Willy Brandt8 decades - 41
Albert Speer9 decades - 42
Jackson Pollock7 decades - 43
Josephine Baker11 decades - 44
Milton Friedman9 decades - 45
Konstantin Chernenko4 decades - 46
Alec Guinness8 decades - 47
Burt Lancaster8 decades - 48
Jesse Owens9 decades - 49
Samuel Beckett7 decades - 50
Dmitri Shostakovich8 decades - 51
Barbara Stanwyck9 decades - 52
Dietrich Bonhoeffer8 decades - 53
Louis de Funès7 decades - 54
Tennessee Williams8 decades - 55
Gene Kelly8 decades - 56
Errol Flynn9 decades - 57
Erich Honecker8 decades - 58
Claus von Stauffenberg4 decades - 59
Faisal of Saudi Arabia2 decades - 60
Kwame Nkrumah7 decades - 61
Edward Teller8 decades - 62
Woody Guthrie8 decades - 63
Jacques Cousteau5 decades - 64
Georges Pompidou8 decades - 65
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller8 decades - 66
Enver Hoxha8 decades - 67
William S. Burroughs5 decades - 68
Joseph McCarthy10 decades - 69
Sergei Korolev6 decades - 70
Simone Weil9 decades - 71
Viktor Frankl6 decades - 72
Christian Dior8 decades - 73
Tenzing Norgay3 decades - 74
Elia Kazan8 decades - 75
Robert A. Heinlein7 decades - 76
Menachem Begin8 decades - 77
James Callaghan8 decades - 78
Astrid Lindgren6 decades - 79
Billy Wilder8 decades - 80
David Niven9 decades - 81
Vincent Price9 decades - 82
Kurt Gödel5 decades - 83
Julia Child6 decades - 84
Ginger Rogers9 decades - 85
Stepan Bandera1 decades - 86
John Huston12 decades - 87
Otto Skorzeny6 decades - 88
Julio Cortázar8 decades - 89
Baba Vanga0 decades - 90
Robert Wadlow0 decades - 91
Simo Häyhä0 decades - 92
L. Ron Hubbard6 decades - 93
Hubert Humphrey8 decades - 94
Sophie Scholl8 decades - 95
Mikhail Sholokhov9 decades - 96
Dylan Thomas9 decades - 97
Burgess Meredith9 decades - 98
Marguerite Duras8 decades - 99
Carole Lombard9 decades - 100
Juan Manuel Fangio7 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.