← Fame through time1948
1948
Whose working lives fell in 1948. 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 1948, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Richard Nixon8 decades - 2
Gerald Ford6 decades - 3
Albert Camus8 decades - 4
Rosa Parks6 decades - 5
Vivien Leigh8 decades - 6
Willy Brandt8 decades - 7
Jesse Owens9 decades - 8
Menachem Begin8 decades - 9
Burt Lancaster8 decades - 10
Paul Erdős0 decades - 11
Loretta Young9 decades - 12
Jean Marais8 decades - 13
Klaus Barbie4 decades - 14
Peter Cushing5 decades - 15
Bảo Đại1 decades - 16
Muddy Waters7 decades - 17
Robert Capa7 decades - 18
Jimmy Hoffanot measured- - 19
Bill Shankly1 decades - 20
Infante Juan, Count of Barcelonanot measured- - 21
Lloyd Bridgesnot measured- - 22
Alan Laddnot measured- - 23
Benjamin Britten8 decades - 24
Sergey Mikhalkov0 decades - 25
Ramón Mercadernot 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.