A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

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.