Exactly!

The opposite is also true: there are MANY authors who had entire series of books in the 1920s that were wildly popular yet largely unknown today.

I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.

Oh yeah one of those “memento mori” things for me is browsing shelves in flea markets with tons of 1890s-1930s popular fiction and appreciating how very many of the authors are now totally unknown. You can do something similar with bestseller lists by year on Wikipedia, go back far enough and even for someone with pretty deep recognition of historical authors it soon becomes a lot of “who? Who? Who?”

> I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.

Even sticking to relatively critically-acclaimed stuff it’s pretty easy to land on films that probably fewer than 1% of people in the Anglosphere (assuming initial popularity in that market) have seen, in the silent era, without going far off the beaten path. Go slightly farther and it’s likely just you and a very small number of other extreme film nerds among the living who’ve ever watched it.

Take DW Griffith, a giant of a director. Got what, 20+ surviving feature films of 40ish made? How many people alive have seen more than three of them? It’s a small number. Hell, it’s not a large number that have watched even one.