The First Fall: Ytterboe Hall, Autumn 1946: A Novel

Four years of free college were among the provisions of the GI Bill of Rights enacted by congress after World War II. In 1946, thousands of returning veterans with generous tuition and expense grants swelled America colleges and universities to overflowing.

St. Olaf, a co-educational liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, founded by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants in 1874, watched its freshman class double. Men were jammed into campus dormitories and the overflow in rooms everywhere -- in campus attics and basements, in a local orphans home, in a remodeled chicken house on the college farm, and in the homes of many local families.

A clash of cultures followed. Blond, blue-eyed Lutheran innocents met these older battle-wise and worldly-wise survivors.

The First Fall examines that conflict in the paring of unlikely roommates: eighteen-year-old Jon Adamson, the son of St. Olaf s Dean of Men, and Anthony Tarpezi, 27, still recovering from battle trauma he experienced in North Africa and Italy.

In their struggle to be friends, roommates, and classmates, Jon and Tony differ in almost every way -- except their desire for the same co-ed -- the dark and beautiful Rhonda Rasmussen.