← Fame through time1949
1949
Whose working lives fell in 1949. 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 1949, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Yuri Andropov4 decades - 2
Hedy Lamarr3 decades - 3
Louis de Funès7 decades - 4
Tenzing Norgay3 decades - 5
Alec Guinness8 decades - 6
William S. Burroughs5 decades - 7
Tove Jansson0 decades - 8
Julio Cortázar8 decades - 9
Romain Gary8 decades - 10
Jiang Qing9 decades - 11
Dylan Thomas9 decades - 12
Marguerite Duras8 decades - 13
Joe Louis9 decades - 14
Jonas Salk7 decades - 15
Joe DiMaggio8 decades - 16
Thor Heyerdahl7 decades - 17
Tyrone Power11 decades - 18
Mohammed Zahir Shah1 decades - 19
Octavio Paz10 decades - 20
Richard Widmarknot measured- - 21
Jack LaLanne0 decades - 22
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr0 decades - 23
Jackie Coogannot measured- - 24
Valentino Mazzolanot measured- - 25
Norman Borlaug5 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.