The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

In the summer of 1860, Roger Button hurries through the streets of ante-bellum Baltimore to a fashionable hospital, expecting to meet his newborn son. He hopes for a boy he can one day send to Yale College. Instead, he finds an anomaly waiting in the nursery: a baby born in the physical form of an elderly man.

Named Benjamin, the child is taken home and forced into the routines of infancy. But his biological clock runs in reverse. As the century turns and Baltimore rushes toward the Jazz Age, Benjamin’s body grows steadily younger. He navigates education, work, and marriage in the wrong direction, watching his peers grow old while he slides physically backward toward youth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published this short story in the 1920s. Spanning the Civil War to the modern era, it grounds the fantasy of reverse aging in the rigid social expectations of an evolving America.