← Fame through time1968
1968
Whose working lives fell in 1968. 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 1968, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Yuri Gagarin6 decades - 2
Michael Caine6 decades - 3
Roman Polanski6 decades - 4
Akihito8 decades - 5
Yoko Ono5 decades - 6
Gene Wilder5 decades - 7
James Brown9 decades - 8
Jean-Paul Belmondo6 decades - 9
Nina Simone5 decades - 10
Karl Lagerfeld4 decades - 11
Quincy Jones7 decades - 12
Garrincha6 decades - 13
Dalida8 decades - 14
Willie Nelson5 decades - 15
Joan Rivers5 decades - 16
Paul Biya5 decades - 17
Ruth Bader Ginsburg4 decades - 18
Philip Roth6 decades - 19
Cormac McCarthy3 decades - 20
Kim Novak7 decades - 21
Just Fontaine3 decades - 22
Lina Medina0 decades - 23
Joan Collins6 decades - 24
Susan Sontag6 decades - 25
Larry King5 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.