By The Time They Were Thirty:

»  T. S. Eliot had written Prufrock and Other Observations, and was only two years away from completing The Waste Land.

»  Orson Welles had directed Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and become the definitive Mr. Rochester in the film version of Jane Eyre.  He had, of course, already stunned North American audiences with his famous radio production of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. 

»  Van Morrison had released nine solo albums, including Astral Weeks and Moondance, two albums regularly cited among the top ten albums in rock and roll history, as well as the classics Tupelo Honey and Saint Dominic's Preview.  He had also written "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Gloria," staple songs for garage bands everywhere three decades later. 

»  Arthur Rimbaud was already past his prime and was settling into what would become the pattern of his self-destruction.

»  Jodie Foster had already won two Academy Awards for Best Actress (for Silence of the Lambs, 1991, and The Accused, 1988, respectively), and had cemented herself as one of the icons of North American cinema.

»  Alexander the Great  (c. 356 - 323 B.C.) was only three years away from his death.  Under Alexander's reign, the Macedonian empire reaches its apogee, and just prior to his thirtieth birthday Alexander and his armies had recrossed the Hindu Kush (in modern Pakistan) to begin the invasion of India.  Previous victories:  the defeats of Thebes, Persia, Tyre, Babylon, and Susa. 

»  Joan of Arc was embers:  she was burned at the stake at nineteen.

»  As Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart turned thirty, performances of The Marriage of Figaro had begun, to little acclaim; it survived for nine performances, though it is now considered a classic.  He had already written numerous symphonies and concertos, and the Unfinished Mass in C Minor.  He died at 35.

»  Michelangelo had just (at age 29) completed his famous sculpture of David, and had just previously completed the Pieta now resident in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

»  Winston Churchill was a controversial member of the House of Commons, and had already written his first book, The River War.  Before turning thirty, Churchill was ambushed and taken prisoner by the Boers while reporting on the Boer War in South Africa. 

»  Leonard Cohen had published The Spice-Box of Earth, one of the few volumes of poetry to sell more than 100,000 copies in Canada. He had also written two other volumes of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies and Flowers for Hitler, and one novel, The Favourite Game.

»  Hannibal had with 60,000 troops crossed the Alps into Italy in an ill-fated siege on Rome.  Around his thirtieth birthday, he celebrated the successful ambush at Lake Trasimeno.

»  Napoleon Bonaparte had reached Egypt and had defeated the Mamelukes, but had already lost to Lord Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.  At thirty, he was five years away from being proclaimed Emperor by the Senate.

»  Marco Polo was in China taking care of goverment business on behalf of Kublai Khan. 

»  John F. Kennedy had just (at 29) been elected to U.S. House of Representatives.

»  Bob Dylan, born in 1941, had already released The Times They Are A-Changin', The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding.  He famously "went electric" in 1965 at the ripe old age of twenty-four.

»  Ray Charles had already recorded the iconic hits "What'd I Say?", "I Gotta Woman," "Lonely Avenue," "Hallelujah, I Love Her So," and "Georgia On My Mind."  It's generally agreed that Charles' "I Gotta Woman" (alternately "I Got A Woman") was the first song of the genre now called 'soul music,' a genre that blended gospel, blues, and jazz sounds.

»  Sir Philip Sidney was two years away from his death in the fields of Holland and had already written his key works, Arcadia, An Apologie for Poetrie, and Astrophil and Stella. 

»  W. B. Yeats had his Poems published in his thirtieth year.  This followed the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, The Countess Kathleen, and The Celtic Twilight. 

»  Sylvia Plath was less than a year away from her suicide.  The Colossus and Other Poems had been published, and in her final year she was compiling the poems later published in the Ariel volume. 

»  Graham Greene had published his third novel, It's A Battlefield.  His previous novels-- The Man Within and Stamboul Train-- are still in print over seventy years later.

»  Robert Lowell had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Lord Weary's Castle.

»  As best as we can tell, by the time of his thirtieth birthday, Jesus has begun his ministry and had been baptized in the Jordan River. 

»  Katharine Hepburn had already won her first Academy Award for Best Actress (for 1933's Morning Glory).  She eventually won four such awards.

»  In her thirtieth year, Bette Davis was about to win her second Academy Award for Best Actress in Jezebel (1938).  She had previously won for Dangerous (1935).

»  Emily Bronte, born 1818, had just published Wuthering Heights (1847).  She died in 1848-- in her thirtieth year-- of tuberculosis.  Her sister Charlotte, born 1816, was in the process of completing Jane Eyre in her thirtieth year.

»  England's King Henry V had already won significant victories at Agincourt and Normandy, and had begun the advance to Paris.  At 33, he would defeat the French forces and be declared Regent of France.  It is under Henry's reign that England last has a presence in continental Europe; the territories in France are eventually lost in the regency and rule of Henry VI. 

»  Charles Dickens had already published The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiousity Shop.  He was visiting America in his thirtieth year. 

»  John Milton had just published Lycidas, still considered by many the seminal example of the elegy.  He had also already published Nativity Ode, Petition of Right and Comus. 

»  Charles Darwin was in the process of publishing his Journal of the H.M.S. Beagle. 

»  George Gordon, Lord Byron, had published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the first canto of Don Juan.  His contemporary, John Keats, died at 25, author of Endymion and Hyperion.  Endymion itself was a poetic effort of 4,000 lines that was finished, albeit not to Keats' satisfaction, within a year.

»  Sir Isaac Newton had already started giving his Optic Lectures and had written De Methodis.  He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University at roughly age 27. 

»  Bill Gates had already started, with Paul Allen, at age twenty the company that so utterly controls our lives now, Microsoft.  By the time of this thirtieth birthday (1985), Gates and his company were in the process of developing the Windows operating system.

Geez, all this makes me feel stunningly inadequate.... And yes, I compiled this myself, so I have no one to blame but myself....