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

A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film.

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.