The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
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“I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922 and was later adapted into the 2008 namesake film and the 2019 stage musical.
The story features Benjamin Button, who, born as an old man much to the dismay and chagrin of his father and family Doctor, ages backwards until he leaves this world as a newborn.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer, although he was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he coined.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the “Great American Novel.” Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941.
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - F. Scott Fitzgerald
1922
Chapter 1
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies—Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of Cuff.
On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o'clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.
When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement—as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.
Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period. Doctor Keene!
he called. Oh, Doctor Keene!
The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.
What happened?
demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush. What was it? How is she? A boy? Who is it? What—
Talk sense!
said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat irritated.
Is the child born?
begged Mr. Button.
Doctor Keene frowned. Why, yes, I suppose so—after a fashion.
Again he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.
Is my wife all right?
Yes.
Is it a boy or a girl?
Here now!
cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of