First published in 1922 and collected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a wry, melancholy fable about a man who lives his life backward. In 1860 Baltimore, Benjamin Button is born as a wizened, white-haired old man with the body and mind of a seventy-year-old — to the horror and embarrassment of his respectable father.
As the decades pass, Benjamin grows steadily younger. He goes to war, takes over the family business, marries, and raises a son, all while his contemporaries age in the ordinary direction and he moves the other way. What begins as a comic curiosity slowly turns poignant, as Benjamin's reverse journey estranges him from his wife, his child, and eventually his own memories, carrying him back toward infancy and oblivion.
Inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's that the best of life comes at the beginning and the worst at the end, Fitzgerald's story is a sharp, bittersweet meditation on time, social conformity, and the loneliness of living out of step with the world.