He left Memphis in the 1960s to attend college, then to travel the US and Europe and ending on a hippie commune in the Ozarks.

[1] Stern subsequently moved to London, England, before returning to Memphis in his thirties to accept a job at The Center for Southern Folklore.

There he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore.

He published his first book, the story collection Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, which was based in The Pinch, in 1983.

It won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and acclaim from some notable critics, including Susan Sontag, who praised the book's "brio ... whiplash sentences ... energy and charm..."[citation needed] Stern's 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award in 1999,[2] and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post.