Who Was Alive

James Joyce

Irish novelist and poet

Born 2 February 1882 · died 13 January 1941, aged 58

Who was alive at the same time as James Joyce?

  1. Victor Hugo
  2. Charles Darwin
  3. Karl Marx
  4. Leo Tolstoy
  5. Mark Twain
  6. Friedrich Nietzsche
  7. Thomas Edison
  8. Vincent van Gogh
  9. Sigmund Freud
  10. Marie Curie
  11. Mahatma Gandhi
  12. Vladimir Lenin
  13. Winston Churchill
  14. Joseph Stalin
  15. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  16. Albert Einstein
  17. Pablo Picasso
  18. James Joyce
  19. Charlie Chaplin
  20. Adolf Hitler
  21. Ronald Reagan
  22. John F. Kennedy
  23. Nelson Mandela
  24. Elizabeth II
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 James Joyce was born, Albert Einstein was 2, Karl Marx was 63, Vladimir Lenin was 11, Mahatma Gandhi was 12 and Leo Tolstoy was 53.

When James Joyce died, Adolf Hitler was 51, Albert Einstein was 61, Ronald Reagan was 29, Nelson Mandela was 22 and Mahatma Gandhi was 71.

Born during James Joyce’s lifetime: Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth II, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Salvador Dalí.

Not quite contemporaries: Donald Trump was born 5 years after James Joyce died, Vladimir Putin was born 11 years after James Joyce died, George W. Bush was born 5 years after James Joyce died and Joe Biden was born about a year after James Joyce died.

Compare

All 849 contemporaries we track

  1. Adolf Hitler 1889 – 1945
  2. Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
  3. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  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. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  10. Joseph Stalin 1878 – 1953
  11. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  12. Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
  13. Pablo Picasso 1881 – 1973
  14. Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965
  15. Charlie Chaplin 1889 – 1977
  16. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  17. Elizabeth II 1926 – 2022
  18. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  19. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1879–1881 – 1938
  20. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  21. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  22. John F. Kennedy 1917 – 1963
  23. Marie Curie 1867 – 1934
  24. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968
  25. Salvador Dalí 1904 – 1989
  26. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  27. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945
  28. Franz Kafka 1883 – 1924
  29. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  30. Marilyn Monroe 1926 – 1962
  31. Pope Francis 1936 – 2025
  32. Mao Zedong 1893 – 1976
  33. Che Guevara 1928 – 1967
  34. Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
  35. Charles de Gaulle 1890 – 1970
  36. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  37. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  38. Neil Armstrong 1930 – 2012
  39. Walt Disney 1901 – 1966
  40. Elvis Presley 1935 – 1977
  41. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  42. George Orwell 1903 – 1950
  43. Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961
  44. Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013
  45. John Paul II 1920 – 2005
  46. Gabriel García Márquez 1927 – 2014
  47. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  48. Fidel Castro 1926 – 2016
  49. J. R. R. Tolkien 1892 – 1973
  50. Albert Camus 1913 – 1960
  51. Yuri Gagarin 1934 – 1968
  52. Henry Ford 1863 – 1947
  53. Marlene Dietrich 1901 – 1992
  54. Mikhail Gorbachev 1931 – 2022
  55. Benito Mussolini 1883 – 1945
  56. Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980
  57. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  58. Le Corbusier 1887 – 1965
  59. Frida Kahlo 1907 – 1954
  60. Mother Teresa 1910 – 1997
  61. Jimmy Carter 1924 – 2024
  62. Benedict XVI 1927 – 2022
  63. Harry S. Truman 1884 – 1972
  64. Agatha Christie 1890 – 1976
  65. George H. W. Bush 1924 – 2018
  66. Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986
  67. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  68. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  69. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  70. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  71. Jawaharlal Nehru 1889 – 1964
  72. Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922
  73. Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890 – 1969
  74. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  75. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  76. Rosa Luxemburg 1871 – 1919
  77. Roald Amundsen 1872 – c. 1928
  78. Alan Turing 1912 – 1954
  79. Richard Nixon 1913 – 1994
  80. Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
  81. Alfred Hitchcock 1899 – 1980
  82. Noam Chomsky born 1928
  83. Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986
  84. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  85. John Maynard Keynes 1883 – 1946
  86. Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962
  87. Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970
  88. Leon Trotsky 1879 – 1940
  89. John Lennon 1940 – 1980
  90. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  91. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  92. Pelé 1940 – 2022
  93. Maxim Gorky 1868 – 1936
  94. Henri Matisse 1869 – 1954
  95. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  96. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  97. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 – 1959
  98. Andy Warhol 1928 – 1987
  99. Louis Armstrong 1901 – 1971
  100. Kofi Annan 1938 – 2018
  101. Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941
  102. Akira Kurosawa 1910 – 1998
  103. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  104. Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 – 1973
  105. Gerald Ford 1913 – 2006
  106. Ernest Rutherford 1871 – 1937
  107. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951
  108. Indira Gandhi 1917 – 1984
  109. Max Weber 1864 – 1920
  110. Huang Xianfan 1899 – 1982
  111. Enrico Fermi 1901 – 1954
  112. Naguib Mahfouz 1911 – 2006
  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. H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946
  119. Helen Keller 1880 – 1968
  120. Tenzin Gyatso born 1935
  121. Pablo Neruda 1904 – 1973
  122. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  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. Herbert Hoover 1874 – 1964
  130. Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962
  131. Isaac Asimov 1919–1920 – 1992
  132. Ingmar Bergman 1918 – 2007
  133. Federico Fellini 1920 – 1993
  134. Mahathir Mohamad born 1925
  135. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  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. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  146. T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965
  147. Stanley Kubrick 1928 – 1999
  148. Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931
  149. Kwame Nkrumah 1909 – 1972
  150. Marlon Brando 1924 – 2004

The 150 best known are listed.