Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1939?

597 of the people we track were surely alive in 1939. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1939: Ali Khamenei, Tina Turner, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, Francis Ford Coppola, Romano Prodi, Gro Harlem Brundtland and Ian McKellen.

Died in 1939: Sigmund Freud, William Butler Yeats, Amelia Earhart and Pius XI.

  1. Adolf Hitler50
  2. Albert Einstein60
  3. Ronald Reagan28
  4. Nelson Mandela21
  5. Mahatma Gandhi70
  6. Joseph Stalin61
  7. Pablo Picasso58
  8. Winston Churchill65
  9. Charlie Chaplin50
  10. Elizabeth II13
  11. Sigmund Freud83 †
  12. John F. Kennedy22
  13. Martin Luther King Jr.10
  14. Salvador Dalí35
  15. Rabindranath Tagore78
  16. Franklin Delano Roosevelt57
  17. Marilyn Monroe13
  18. Pope Francis3
  19. Mao Zedong46
  20. Che Guevara11
  21. Charles de Gaulle49
  22. Nikola Tesla83
  23. Neil Armstrong9
  24. Walt Disney38
  25. Elvis Presley4
  26. George Orwell36
  27. Ernest Hemingway40
  28. Margaret Thatcher14
  29. James Joyce57
  30. John Paul II19
  31. Gabriel García Márquez12
  32. Fidel Castro13
  33. J. R. R. Tolkien47
  34. Albert Camus26
  35. Yuri Gagarin5
  36. Henry Ford76
  37. Marlene Dietrich38
  38. Mikhail Gorbachev8
  39. Benito Mussolini56
  40. Jean-Paul Sartre34
  41. Le Corbusier52
  42. Frida Kahlo32
  43. Mother Teresa29
  44. Jimmy Carter15
  45. Benedict XVI12
  46. Harry S. Truman55
  47. Agatha Christie49
  48. George H. W. Bush15
  49. Jorge Luis Borges40
  50. Jawaharlal Nehru50
  51. Dwight D. Eisenhower49
  52. Alan Turing27
  53. Richard Nixon26
  54. Alfred Hitchcock40
  55. Noam Chomsky11
  56. Simone de Beauvoir31
  57. George Bernard Shaw83
  58. John Maynard Keynes56
  59. Niels Bohr54
  60. Bertrand Russell67
  61. Leon Trotsky60
  62. Max Planck81
  63. Henri Matisse70
  64. Frank Lloyd Wright72
  65. Andy Warhol11
  66. Louis Armstrong38
  67. Kofi Annan1
  68. Virginia Woolf57
  69. Akira Kurosawa29
  70. Lyndon B. Johnson31
  71. Gerald Ford26
  72. Ludwig Wittgenstein50
  73. Indira Gandhi22
  74. Huang Xianfan40
  75. Enrico Fermi38
  76. Naguib Mahfouz28
  77. Nikita Khrushchev45
  78. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry39
  79. Anne Frank10
  80. Saddam Hussein2
  81. H. G. Wells73
  82. Helen Keller59
  83. Tenzin Gyatso4
  84. Pablo Neruda35
  85. Igor Stravinsky57
  86. David Hilbert77
  87. Thomas Mann64
  88. Erwin Schrödinger52
  89. Silvio Berlusconi3
  90. Herbert Hoover65
  91. Hermann Hesse62
  92. Isaac Asimov19–20
  93. Ingmar Bergman21
  94. Federico Fellini19
  95. Mahathir Mohamad14
  96. Boris Yeltsin8
  97. Ali Khameneiborn
  98. Kim Il-sung27
  99. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn21
  100. Jacques Chirac7
  101. T. S. Eliot51
  102. Stanley Kubrick11
  103. Kwame Nkrumah30
  104. Marlon Brando15
  105. Hirohito38
  106. Richard Feynman21
  107. Woody Allen4
  108. Selma Lagerlöf81
  109. Bertolt Brecht41
  110. William Butler Yeats73 †
  111. Yasser Arafat10
  112. Ho Chi Minh49
  113. Judy Garland17
  114. Carl Jung64
  115. Brigitte Bardot5
  116. Vladimir Nabokov40
  117. Hebe Camargo10
  118. Umberto Eco7
  119. Eleanor Roosevelt55
  120. B. R. Ambedkar48

The 120 best known of 597 are listed.