John L. Clive, professor of history at Harvard University and winner of the National Book Award, died January 7, 1990 at the age of sixty-five. Clive won the National Book Award in 1974 for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a nineteenth-century Scottish historian. Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History, Clive's latest book, is one of five books nominated for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle award for distinguished criticism.

Among his other honors, Clive received the AHA Robert Livingston Schuyler Prize in 1976 and fellowships from the Royal Historical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Berlin, Clive came to the United States in 1940. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina and went on to receive his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University where he began teaching in 1948. Since 1979 Clive had been the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Literature.