In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

First edition, 1966
Author	Jean Shepherd
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Humor
Publisher	Doubleday Broadway Books
Publication date	1966
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN
OCLC	4583520

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. Portions of the work were adapted into the 1983 movie A Christmas Story (which was also narrated by Shepherd) and into the 1994 film It Runs in the Family.

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 claims it took him three years to write the novel.