← Fame through time1941
1941
Whose working lives fell in 1941. 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 1941, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Leonid Brezhnev7 decades - 2
Hannah Arendt8 decades - 3
Samuel Beckett7 decades - 4
Adolf Eichmann8 decades - 5
Dmitri Shostakovich8 decades - 6
Josephine Baker11 decades - 7
Aristotle Onassis6 decades - 8
Puyi8 decades - 9
Faisal of Saudi Arabia2 decades - 10
Kurt Gödel5 decades - 11
Dietrich Bonhoeffer8 decades - 12
Billy Wilder8 decades - 13
John Huston12 decades - 14
Sayyid Qutb4 decades - 15
Sergei Korolev6 decades - 16
Luchino Visconti12 decades - 17
Roberto Rossellini8 decades - 18
Grace Hopper4 decades - 19
Ed Geinnot measured- - 20
Klaus Mann10 decades - 21
John Carradinenot measured- - 22
Ilse Kochnot measured- - 23
Soichiro Honda0 decades - 24
George Sandersnot measured- - 25
Albert Hofmann8 decades
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.