The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Study Guide

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and spent most of his childhood in Buffalo, New York. When he was 15, his parents sent him to school in New Jersey, where he met a teacher who encouraged him to develop his talent for writing stories. Fitzgerald went on to study at Princeton University, where he pursued his passion for writing so wholeheartedly that his grades suffered, and he eventually dropped out to enlist in the army. Though World War I ended before Fitzgerald was deployed, he met Zelda Sayre—whom he would later marry—while he was posted in Alabama. In 1920, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which became an overnight success. The couple moved to Paris in 1924, where Fitzgerald supported his family primarily by selling short stories to popular magazines—he also published his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, a year later. By 1931, though, Zelda had begun to suffer from mental illness. The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States, where Zelda was in and out of hospitals from 1936 onward. From 1936 until the end of his life in 1940, Fitzgerald spent much of his time in Hollywood, struggling with alcoholism and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to write screenplays. He died of a heart attack at the age of 44.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” takes place in Baltimore in 1860, a year before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Baltimore was full of tension during this period. The state of Maryland was technically part of the Union, but many of its most powerful citizens supported slavery and wanted the state to secede from the Union—some of these people even went against their own state and joined the Confederate Army. This divide was very much alive in Baltimore, which had the largest population of non-enslaved Black people. And, because of the city’s emphasis on manufacturing, it strongly resembled some of the more progressive cities in the North. However, some of the richest, most influential people in Baltimore supported the Confederacy. In the story, these are the kind of people with whom Benjamin Button’s family most likely socializes, since the Buttons are wealthy and part of Baltimore’s high society. Of course, the story isn’t completely centered around this dynamic, but it is the case that the outbreak of the Civil War takes attention away from the gossip surrounding Benjamin’s reverse-aging condition.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” might seem unique in the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other literary work, since he’s mostly known for writing realist stories about life during the Jazz Age. However, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” isn’t his only work of fantasy or speculative fiction. In fact, he published a small handful of supernatural or speculative tales—like “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” for instance, in which a small glass bowl brings bad luck and hardship to a woman and her family. There’s also his novella The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, which features a diamond that is, as the title suggests, the size of an entire hotel. In terms of the inspiration for “Benjamin Button,” Fitzgerald claimed in the introduction to Tales of the Jazz Age—the collection in which “Benjamin Button” eventually appeared—that the story was based on something Mark Twain supposedly said: namely, that it’s too bad the best part of life is at the beginning and the worst part is at the end. The introduction to Tales of the Jazz Age also maintains that a very similar plot can be found in the notebooks of the British author Samuel Butler, though Fitzgerald claims to have only read this after completing “Benjamin Button.” In the nearly 100 years since its publication, the story has become one of the best-known examples of a sub-genre of science fiction called “Age Regression Fiction,” in which characters age in reverse. Famous writers like Philip K. Dick and Roald Dahl have experimented with this premise.