← Fame through time1959
1959
Whose working lives fell in 1959. 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 1959, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Jimmy Carter7 decades - 2
George H. W. Bush2 decades - 3
Marlon Brando7 decades - 4
Robert Mugabe5 decades - 5
Lauren Bacall8 decades - 6
Charles Aznavour8 decades - 7
Truman Capote8 decades - 8
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia0 decades - 9
Marcello Mastroianni7 decades - 10
James Baldwin10 decades - 11
Buddy Holly5 decades - 12
Raj Kapoor5 decades - 13
Lee Marvin6 decades - 14
Sidney Lumet6 decades - 15
Eva Marie Saint7 decades - 16
Don Knotts5 decades - 17
Süleyman Demirel1 decades - 18
Kim Dae-jung4 decades - 19
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haqnot measured- - 20
Benny Hill4 decades - 21
Ritchie Valensnot measured- - 22
Cicely Tyson4 decades - 23
Francisco Macías Nguema Biyoko1 decades - 24
Eli Cohennot measured- - 25
Henry Mancini6 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.