Who Was Alive

Henry David Thoreau

American essayist, poet, and philosopher

Born 12 July 1817 · died 6 May 1862, aged 44

Who was alive at the same time as Henry David Thoreau?

  1. Thomas Jefferson
  2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  3. Ludwig van Beethoven
  4. Napoleon
  5. Lord Byron
  6. Alexander Pushkin
  7. Victor Hugo
  8. Hans Christian Andersen
  9. Edgar Allan Poe
  10. Abraham Lincoln
  11. Charles Darwin
  12. Charles Dickens
  13. Henry David Thoreau
  14. Karl Marx
  15. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  16. Leo Tolstoy
  17. Mark Twain
  18. Friedrich Nietzsche
  19. Thomas Edison
  20. Vincent van Gogh
  21. Oscar Wilde
  22. Sigmund Freud
  23. Anton Chekhov
  24. Rabindranath Tagore
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 Henry David Thoreau was born, Abraham Lincoln was 8, Napoleon was 47, Charles Darwin was 8, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 67 and Victor Hugo was 15.

When Henry David Thoreau died, Karl Marx was 44, Abraham Lincoln was 53, Leo Tolstoy was 33, Charles Darwin was 53 and Victor Hugo was 60.

Born during Henry David Thoreau’s lifetime: Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Vincent van Gogh, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud.

Not quite contemporaries: Vladimir Lenin was born 8 years after Henry David Thoreau died, Mahatma Gandhi was born 7 years after Henry David Thoreau died, Winston Churchill was born 12 years after Henry David Thoreau died and Immanuel Kant died 13 years before Henry David Thoreau was born.

Compare

All 329 contemporaries we track

  1. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  2. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  3. Napoleon 1769 – 1821
  4. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  5. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832
  7. Ludwig van Beethoven c. 1770 – 1827
  8. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  9. Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
  10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  11. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  12. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  13. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  14. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  15. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  16. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  17. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  18. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  19. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  20. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  21. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  22. Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
  23. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  24. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  25. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  26. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  27. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  28. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  29. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  30. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  31. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  32. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  33. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  34. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  35. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  36. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  37. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  38. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  39. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  40. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  41. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  42. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  43. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  44. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  45. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  46. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  47. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  48. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  49. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  50. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  51. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  52. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  53. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  54. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  55. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  56. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  57. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  58. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  59. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  60. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  61. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  62. David Hilbert 1862 – 1943
  63. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  64. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  65. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  66. Anatole France 1844 – 1924
  67. Alexander Graham Bell 1847 – 1922
  68. Octave Mirbeau 1848 – 1917
  69. James Watt 1736 – 1819
  70. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  71. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  72. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  73. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  74. Lewis Carroll 1832 – 1898
  75. Wilhelm Röntgen 1845 – 1923
  76. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  77. Claude Monet 1840 – 1926
  78. Guy de Maupassant 1850 – 1893
  79. Selma Lagerlöf 1858 – 1940
  80. Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 – 1894
  81. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  82. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  83. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  84. Antonín Dvořák 1841 – 1904
  85. Gustav Mahler 1860 – 1911
  86. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  87. James A. Garfield 1831 – 1881
  88. Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
  89. William Howard Taft 1857 – 1930
  90. Giacomo Puccini 1858 – 1924
  91. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  92. Grover Cleveland 1837 – 1908
  93. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  94. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  95. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  96. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  97. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  98. Arthur Rimbaud 1854 – 1891
  99. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  100. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  101. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  102. William McKinley 1843 – 1901
  103. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  104. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  105. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  106. L. L. Zamenhof 1859 – 1917
  107. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  108. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  109. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  110. Rutherford B. Hayes 1822 – 1893
  111. Paul Cézanne 1839 – 1906
  112. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1846 – 1916
  113. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  114. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  115. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  116. Henri Bergson 1859 – 1941
  117. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  118. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  119. Benjamin Harrison 1833 – 1901
  120. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  121. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  122. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  123. Knut Hamsun 1859 – 1952
  124. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  125. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  126. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  127. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  128. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  129. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  130. Paul Gauguin 1848 – 1903
  131. Chester A. Arthur 1829 – 1886
  132. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  133. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  134. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  135. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  136. Auguste Rodin 1840 – 1917
  137. Antoni Gaudí 1852 – 1926
  138. Henri Poincaré 1854 – 1912
  139. Pierre Curie 1859 – 1906
  140. Wilhelm II 1859 – 1941
  141. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  142. Joseph Conrad 1857 – 1924
  143. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  144. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  145. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  146. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  147. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  148. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1832 – 1910
  149. Robert Koch 1843 – 1910
  150. Émile Durkheim 1858 – 1917

The 150 best known are listed.