← Fame through time1960
1960
Whose working lives fell in 1960. 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 1960, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Margaret Thatcher6 decades - 2
Malcolm X6 decades - 3
Pol Pot5 decades - 4
Paul Newman7 decades - 5
Robert F. Kennedy7 decades - 6
Idi Amin5 decades - 7
Patrice Lumumba8 decades - 8
Yukio Mishima6 decades - 9
Richard Burton10 decades - 10
Tony Curtis7 decades - 11
Jack Lemmon7 decades - 12
Angela Lansbury6 decades - 13
Rock Hudson7 decades - 14
B.B. King5 decades - 15
Hal Holbrook5 decades - 16
Gore Vidal7 decades - 17
Lee Van Cleef5 decades - 18
Jorge Rafael Videla5 decades - 19
Barbara Bush4 decades - 20
Gilles Deleuze7 decades - 21
Frantz Fanon7 decades - 22
Johnny Carson6 decades - 23
Rod Steiger7 decades - 24
Dick Van Dyke6 decades - 25
Robert Altman5 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.