The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

SYNOPSIS

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It first appeared in the May 27th edition of Collier’s Weekly and later that year was included in his book of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age.

The protagonist, Benjamin Button, is born as a feeble old man, and ages in reverse until he become a baby at the end of his life. Fitzgerald noted that “This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.” In this new publication, the story gets a graphic interpretation by Calef Brown, an artist whose illustrations have appeared in numerous national and international publications, among them Time, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker.

Paramount Studios will be releasing the film of the same name on November 26, 2008, starring Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett as his wife. The film is directed by David Fincher of Fight Club fame.

ILLUSTRATOR PROFILE

Calef Brown is an artist whose illustrations have appeared in numerous national and international publications, among them Time, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Times. He has written and illustrated numerous children’s books including the bestselling Polkabats and Octopus Slacks: 14 Stories. His paintings and drawings have been shown in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and his work was included in “America Illustrated,” the inaugural exhibit at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. He lives and works in Pasadena, California.

AUTHOR PROFILE

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and educated at the Newman School and at Princeton University. He left Princeton after three years to serve in the First World War, but although stationed in France, saw no action. He was able to devote much of his time in uniform to writing, and his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), followed by a number of short stories published throughout the 1920s, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922), saw his reputation as a new literary light firmly established.

Fitzgerald is best remembered for his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a portrait of the wealthy and morally indifferent societies of New York and Long Island. Many feel it to be the defining document of its age. F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940, leaving unfinished The Last Tycoon, a novel about a Hollywood mogul that in its posthumous edition rekindled the critical interest that had eluded the author for so many years.