The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantastical satire about aging. It is the strange and haunting story of Benjamin Button who is born as an old man and ages backwards so that at the end of his life he is a baby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and the couple divided their time between New York, Paris, and the Riviera, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of fourty-four, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. For his sharp social insight and breathtaking lyricism, Fitzgerald stands as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.