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The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film
by Jean Shepherd
A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana—the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film and the live musical on Fox.
The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.
This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker's shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father's pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie's duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie's unstoppable campaign to get Santa—or anyone else—to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid"?
The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.
What book have you read that’s set in or near your hometown?
I love this question. Everyone has seen A Christmas Story a zillion times. It is based on stories in the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966) by Jean Shepherd. Mr. Shepherd also co-scripted and was narrator of the movie. He grew up in Hammond, IN and went to the same high school as I ...
-Connie_K
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This information about A Christmas Story was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
For many years a cult radio and cabaret personality in New York City, Jean Shepherd was the creator of the popular film A Christmas Story, which is based on his novels In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, and which has become a holiday tradition on the Turner Network. Jean Shepherd passed away in 1999.
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