Chris Miller's Memoir of his Fraternity Days

The Real Animal House is the true version of the Animal House saga, chronicling the creative misbehavior of the members of Dartmouth Alpha Delta Phi during the ’60-’61 school year.  Hollywood tends to sugarcoat things, to make the audience more comfortable.  Some might be surprised to hear that Animal House, too, is sugarcoated, what with all that sex and rowdy behavior.  But really, none of the Deltas does anything too perverse; in fact, they’re all pretty huggable.  The guys they were remotely based on more reseembled a pack of highly-intelligent but totally whacked-out hyenas.  Dartmouth ADs between 1955 and 1965 were acting out a kind of anti-wholesome performance art a decade or so before that term was coined.  Publicly ripping off one’s underwear and eating it with great gusto was only the tiniest finger-tip of what they did, but it’s emblematic.  These were guys who’d grown up in stifling upper middle-class propriety and would return to it after graduation and marriage.  In that short four-year window of being in college, they had to raise a lifetime’s worth of hell.  So they did.

The story is told in the form of a memoir recounting Chris' sophomore year at Dartmouth.  That was the year he joined the fraternity, and the year when the older guys loomed largest to him as mythic figures.  For that is how he saw them.  Dumptruck, Otter, Magpie and Snot were like weird versions of Apollo, Dionysus and Zeus to his young eyes.  He has endeavored to describe its odd rituals and inspired improvisational acts in unstinting prose.  He hopes you enjoy it all, and don't boot, even once.

Buy the book here
Intro to the book from Harold Ramis
NEW! Chris' 40-page GLOSSARY of early sixties Americana as included in the paperback edition.
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