In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash is a novel by American humorist Jean Shepherd first published in October 1966. A best-seller at the time of its publication, it is considered Shepherd's most important published work. The work inspired several films in the Parker Family Saga, including A Christmas Story (1983) and My Summer Story (1994). Shepherd is the narrator in both films. About the book Jean Shepherd was a well-known American humorist who performed on radio in the decades after World War II. Beginning in June 1964, he began adapting many of his radio stories for publication in Playboy magazine. He focused primarily on those stories which depicted his childhood in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana (a stand-in for Shepherd's home town of Hammond, Indiana). According to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, author Shel Silverstein had long encouraged Shepherd to write down his radio stories, but Shepherd was reluctant to do so because he was not a writer. Eventually, Silverstein recorded Shepherd's stories on tape, transcribed them, and then together with Shepherd edited and developed them. Fellow WOR AM radio personality Barry Farber said Shepherd came to enjoy writing, as it allowed him to develop themes, and Shepherd began to work on written stories by himself. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash was the first book Shepherd wrote, and contained his most popular radio stories. These stories were also some of the earliest of Shepherd's work to appear in Playboy. Although they are often described as nostalgic or memoirs, Shepherd rejected these descriptions. He argued instead that they were fictional stories about childhood. Shepherd claimed it took him three years to write the novel. Whether the stories are truth or fiction is not entirely clear. Shepherd denied that he was merely remembering his childhood, and repeatedly asserted in interviews that his stories were entirely fictional. Scholars Penelope Joan Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland agree that the stories are entirely fictional. However, at least some elements of the novel draw on the real world. For example, the names of many of the characters in Shepherd's book can be found in Shepherd's high school yearbook, "Hohman" is the name of a major street in Hammond, Shepherd's younger brother was named Randy, and Hammond has a Cleveland Street and a Warren G. Harding Elementary School. The truth may lie somewhere in between, as Mark Skertic for the Chicago Sun-Times put