"novel" once again

[Jonathan Lighter]

This is getting creepy.

  1993 James S. Olson _The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research_ (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press) 388: W.D. Ehrhart's _Vietnam-Perkasie_ (1978) is a novel that shows how an innocent American boy is transformed...into a killing machine.

  Prof. Ehrhart's book, well known among scholars of the war and still in print, is subtitled: "A Combat Marine Memoir."  It gives no indication of being fiction.

  Prof. Olson is Distinguished Professor of History at Sam Houston State University.

  Now, I'm not out there searching for examples of "novel" meaning "book-length prose narrative, whether fictional or not."  These exx. just jump at me.  That several have come from liberal-arts Ph.D's is to me astonishing.

  JL


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