John Leonard Clive

John Leonard Clive (born Hans Leo Kleyff; September 25, 1924 – January 7, 1990) was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History.

Biography[edit]

Born Hans Leo Kleyff (later anglicized to John Leonard Clive) in Berlin to German-Jewish parents, he attended the Französisches Gymnasium Berlin, before moving to England in 1937 where he went to Buxton College.^[1] In 1940 he emigrated with his family to the United States, where he attended the University of North Carolina.^[2] After his graduation he entered the army and joined the OSS.^[3]

In 1952 Clive received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and began teaching there. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957.^[4] That year he published Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815. in 1960 Clive moved to the University of Chicago, where he was an assistant and associate professor until returning to Harvard in 1965.^[1] He would remain at Harvard for the rest of his career ultimately becoming the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Literature in 1979.^[5]

Clive won the National Book Award for Biography and History in 1974 for Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well.^[6] Clive retired in 1989 and gave his last lecture that December. He died of a heart attack on January 7, 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for his final book, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History.

Further reading[edit]

Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.), The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9, pp. 9‒10, 24, 33, 36, 109, 355‒56. (with short biography and bibliography)

Notes[edit]