The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (short story)

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  First published in Collier's Magazine on May 27, 1922.  It was subsequently anthologized in his book Tales of the Jazz Age, which is occasionally published as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories.  It also was later adapted into the 2008  namesake film and in 2019 into a stage musical. 

Plot 
In 1860 Baltimore, Benjamin is born with the physical appearance of an 80-year-old man, already capable of speech.  His father Roger invites neighborhood boys to play with him and orders him to play with children's toys, but Benjamin obeys only to please his father.  At five, Benjamin is sent to kindergarten but is quickly withdrawn after he repeatedly falls asleep during child activities. 

At the age of 18, Benjamin enrolls in Yale College, but is sent home by officials, who think he is a 50-year-old lunatic.  When Benjamin turns 20, the Button family realizes that he is aging backwards. 

In 1880, when Benjamin is 20, his father gives him a control of Roger Button & Co. Wholesale Hardware.  He meets the young Hildegarde Moncrief, a daughter of General Moncrief, and falls in love with her.  Hildegarde mistakes Benjamin for a 50-year-old brother of Roger Button; she prefers older men and marries him six months later, but remains ignorant of his condition.  Years later, Benjamin's business has been successful, but he is tired of Hildegarde because her beauty has faded and she nags him.  Bored at home, he enlists in the Spanish–American War in 1898 and achieves great triumph in the military, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.  He retires from the army to focus on his company, and receives a medal. 

In 1910, Benjamin, now looking like a 20-year-old, turns over control of his company to his son, Roscoe, and enrolls at Harvard University.  His first year there is a great success: he dominates in football and takes revenge against Yale for having rejected him years before.  However, during his junior and senior years he is only 16 years old, too weak to play football and barely able to cope with the academic work. 

After graduation, Benjamin returns home, only to learn that his wife has moved to Italy.  He lives with Roscoe, who treats him sternly, and forces Benjamin to call him "uncle."  As the years progress, Benjamin grows from a moody teenager into a child.  Eventually, Roscoe has a child of his own who later attends kindergarten with Benjamin.  After kindergarten, Benjamin slowly begins to lose memory of his earlier life.  His memory fades away to the point where he cannot remember anything except his nurse.  Everything fades to darkness shortly after. 

Similar stories 
Fitzgerald, in his introduction to the story, remarks that he came across a similar plot in Samuel Butler's Note-Books several weeks after publishing Benjamin Button.  

In 1921, British novelist Oliver Onions published a novel, The Tower of Oblivion, about a man of 45 who begins to age backward, to grow younger. 

A story with a similar plot was published in 1921 by the Austrian author Roda Roda in Die sieben Leidenschaften (The seven tempers; Rikola Verlag, Vienna 1922) under the title "Antonius de Padua Findling".  J. G. Ballard's 1961 story "Mr F. is Mr F." features a man who regresses from adulthood to infancy when his wife becomes pregnant. 

Manuel de Pedrolo's 1975 Trajecte final ("Final journey") collection of short stories contains a story ("El regressiu" - "The regressive") set in a dystopian future with strict birth control in which a man starts regressing in age when he hits 78 and dies as an infant. 

The short story "Angel of the Backward Look" by Jennifer Loraine is about a man who starts to get younger, losing height and weight and regressing in age and mental ability. 

In W. P. Kinsella's 1986 novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, the character Marylyle Baron tells a tale about "strange happenings" in Johnson County, Iowa: "The Backwards Plague" struck in the early 1900s.  Young men and women in their late teens to early twenties suddenly started losing body mass.  Eventually, they regressed to their birth weight, looking like newborn babies.  At that point the plague stopped, and its victims began to grow again.  

In T. H. White's The Once and Future King, an Arthurian fantasy novel published in 1958, Merlyn the magician is depicted as living backwards through time.  

In the comic 2000AD, issue 308, 19 March 1983, there is a story called "The Reversible Man" which starts with the man lying on the ground having died and he travels backwards through his life getting younger.  He sees his children get un-born and he un-meets his wife and he regresses to babyhood and is eventually un-born himself.  Another story based on a similar plot is The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer.  Ray Bradbury's 2001 novel From the Dust Returned contains a short story ("Make Haste to Live") in which an old woman is born in a grave and regresses in age as time passes. 

Damon Knight's short story "Backward, O Time" is set on a world where everyone lives life backwards.   The story follows a man who is "born" in a car crash, and follows him to the point when he "meets" his mother. 

In Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's 2000 Arabic short story A different kind of legend, a part of the author's mini novel series Paranormal, the main character, Dr. Refaat Ismael, is treated by a mysterious man who claims he can restore youth.  After that the Dr. begins to grow younger and records his feelings and daily events in his diaries.  He goes from a grumpy old man to an energetic man to a carefree teenager to a helpless child in a few weeks.  He is an infant when he is eventually rescued by his friends who reverse the paranormal spell. 

References

External links 

 Full text of the story online at The University of Virginia
 Full text of the story online at Feedbooks.com
 
 Complete recording of original unabridged version of the 1921 short story at Archive.org
 

Category:1922 short stories
Category:Fantasy short stories
Category:Baltimore in fiction
Category:Short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Category:Works originally published in Collier's
Category:Short stories adapted into films

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