Who Was Alive

George Orwell

British writer and journalist

Born 25 June 1903 · died 21 January 1950, aged 46

Who was alive at the same time as George Orwell?

  1. Leo Tolstoy
  2. Mark Twain
  3. Thomas Edison
  4. Sigmund Freud
  5. Marie Curie
  6. Mahatma Gandhi
  7. Vladimir Lenin
  8. Winston Churchill
  9. Joseph Stalin
  10. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  11. Albert Einstein
  12. Pablo Picasso
  13. Charlie Chaplin
  14. Adolf Hitler
  15. George Orwell
  16. Salvador Dalí
  17. Ronald Reagan
  18. John F. Kennedy
  19. Nelson Mandela
  20. Elizabeth II
  21. Martin Luther King Jr.
  22. Joe Biden
  23. Donald Trump
  24. George W. Bush
Drag across the timeline to see who was alive in any year and the age each person reached that year. Faded ends mark uncertain dates.

When George Orwell was born, Adolf Hitler was 14, Albert Einstein was 24, Vladimir Lenin was 33, Mahatma Gandhi was 33 and Leo Tolstoy was 74.

When George Orwell died, Donald Trump was 3, Albert Einstein was 70, Ronald Reagan was 38, Nelson Mandela was 31 and George W. Bush was 3.

Born during George Orwell’s lifetime: Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, Elizabeth II, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr..

Not quite contemporaries: Barack Obama was born 11 years after George Orwell died, Michael Jackson was born 8 years after George Orwell died, Vladimir Putin was born 2 years after George Orwell died and Vincent van Gogh died 13 years before George Orwell was born.

Compare

All 915 contemporaries we track

  1. Donald Trump born 1946
  2. Adolf Hitler 1889 – 1945
  3. Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
  4. Ronald Reagan 1911 – 2004
  5. Vladimir Lenin 1870 – 1924
  6. Nelson Mandela 1918 – 2013
  7. Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948
  8. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  9. George W. Bush born 1946
  10. Joseph Stalin 1878 – 1953
  11. Joe Biden born 1942
  12. Pablo Picasso 1881 – 1973
  13. Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965
  14. Charlie Chaplin 1889 – 1977
  15. Elizabeth II 1926 – 2022
  16. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  17. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1879–1881 – 1938
  18. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  19. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  20. John F. Kennedy 1917 – 1963
  21. Marie Curie 1867 – 1934
  22. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968
  23. Salvador Dalí 1904 – 1989
  24. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  25. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945
  26. Franz Kafka 1883 – 1924
  27. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  28. Marilyn Monroe 1926 – 1962
  29. Pope Francis 1936 – 2025
  30. Mao Zedong 1893 – 1976
  31. Che Guevara 1928 – 1967
  32. Bill Clinton born 1946
  33. Charles de Gaulle 1890 – 1970
  34. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  35. Neil Armstrong 1930 – 2012
  36. Walt Disney 1901 – 1966
  37. Elvis Presley 1935 – 1977
  38. Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961
  39. Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013
  40. James Joyce 1882 – 1941
  41. John Paul II 1920 – 2005
  42. Gabriel García Márquez 1927 – 2014
  43. Fidel Castro 1926 – 2016
  44. J. R. R. Tolkien 1892 – 1973
  45. Albert Camus 1913 – 1960
  46. Yuri Gagarin 1934 – 1968
  47. Henry Ford 1863 – 1947
  48. Marlene Dietrich 1901 – 1992
  49. Mikhail Gorbachev 1931 – 2022
  50. Benito Mussolini 1883 – 1945
  51. Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980
  52. Stephen Hawking 1942 – 2018
  53. Le Corbusier 1887 – 1965
  54. Frida Kahlo 1907 – 1954
  55. Mother Teresa 1910 – 1997
  56. Jimmy Carter 1924 – 2024
  57. Benedict XVI 1927 – 2022
  58. Harry S. Truman 1884 – 1972
  59. Agatha Christie 1890 – 1976
  60. Hillary Clinton born 1947
  61. George H. W. Bush 1924 – 2018
  62. Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986
  63. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  64. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  65. Jawaharlal Nehru 1889 – 1964
  66. Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922
  67. Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890 – 1969
  68. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  69. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  70. Rosa Luxemburg 1871 – 1919
  71. Roald Amundsen 1872 – c. 1928
  72. Alan Turing 1912 – 1954
  73. Richard Nixon 1913 – 1994
  74. Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
  75. Alfred Hitchcock 1899 – 1980
  76. Noam Chomsky born 1928
  77. Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986
  78. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  79. John Maynard Keynes 1883 – 1946
  80. Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962
  81. Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970
  82. Muammar Gaddafi 1942 – 2011
  83. Leon Trotsky 1879 – 1940
  84. John Lennon 1940 – 1980
  85. Bob Dylan born 1941
  86. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  87. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  88. Pelé 1940 – 2022
  89. Muhammad Ali 1942 – 2016
  90. Maxim Gorky 1868 – 1936
  91. Henri Matisse 1869 – 1954
  92. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  93. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 – 1959
  94. Andy Warhol 1928 – 1987
  95. Louis Armstrong 1901 – 1971
  96. Kofi Annan 1938 – 2018
  97. Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941
  98. Akira Kurosawa 1910 – 1998
  99. Lech Wałęsa born 1943
  100. Freddie Mercury 1946 – 1991
  101. Charles III born 1948
  102. Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 – 1973
  103. Gerald Ford 1913 – 2006
  104. Ernest Rutherford 1871 – 1937
  105. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951
  106. Indira Gandhi 1917 – 1984
  107. Max Weber 1864 – 1920
  108. Huang Xianfan 1899 – 1982
  109. Enrico Fermi 1901 – 1954
  110. Naguib Mahfouz 1911 – 2006
  111. Aung San Suu Kyi born 1945
  112. Steven Spielberg born 1946
  113. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  114. Nikita Khrushchev 1894 – 1971
  115. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944
  116. Anne Frank 1929 – 1945
  117. Saddam Hussein 1937 – 2006
  118. Benjamin Netanyahu born 1949
  119. H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946
  120. Helen Keller 1880 – 1968
  121. Tenzin Gyatso born 1935
  122. Pablo Neruda 1904 – 1973
  123. Igor Stravinsky 1882 – 1971
  124. David Hilbert 1862 – 1943
  125. Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955
  126. Bruce Lee 1940 – 1973
  127. Erwin Schrödinger 1887 – 1961
  128. Silvio Berlusconi 1936 – 2023
  129. Bob Marley 1945 – 1981
  130. Herbert Hoover 1874 – 1964
  131. Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962
  132. Isaac Asimov 1919–1920 – 1992
  133. Ingmar Bergman 1918 – 2007
  134. Federico Fellini 1920 – 1993
  135. Mahathir Mohamad born 1925
  136. Anatole France 1844 – 1924
  137. Alexander Graham Bell 1847 – 1922
  138. Octave Mirbeau 1848 – 1917
  139. Calvin Coolidge 1872 – 1933
  140. Boris Yeltsin 1931 – 2007
  141. Ali Khamenei 1939 – 2026
  142. Kim Il-sung 1912 – 1994
  143. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918 – 2008
  144. Jacques Chirac 1932 – 2019
  145. T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965
  146. Stanley Kubrick 1928 – 1999
  147. Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931
  148. Kwame Nkrumah 1909 – 1972
  149. Marlon Brando 1924 – 2004
  150. Wilhelm Röntgen 1845 – 1923

The 150 best known are listed.