Fitzgerald wrote “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 1920, after his initial collection of stories, Flappers and Philosophers, had just been published. The story was rejected by Metropolitan magazine but ultimately picked up by Collier's for $1000. Fitzgerald then placed it in his next collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, which came out in 1922. The collection was severely criticized, and he ended with a profit of slightly less than $3500, not as much as for the earlier collection, which had not done well either. The reviewers who liked it, as Alice Hall Petry has noted in Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction (60), praised it for its amusing qualities, not for his writing skill. Another well-known story, “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz,” was published in the same collection, and certainly overshadowed “Benjamin Button.”
Fitzgerald tried to show, through the life of his main character, the historical changes America was undergoing in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. The time span is 1860-1930 (far earlier than that in the film). Fitzgerald was clearly using the 1920s to look forward to an uncertain future that the Jazz Age could not even begin to imagine but which he perhaps anticipated.
As in so many of his early stories and novels, money is a key factor, here representing the Gilded Age. For the Buttons, money means everything, and Baltimore, where the story (but not the film) is set, has as rigid a social hierarchy as New York or any of the cities experiencing a fresh wave of success.
There is no real love story in the original as in the film. Benjamin does fall in love with Hildegarde Moncrief (!) but it is almost a comical dimension. Indeed, the story is ironic from beginning to end, the humor consisting in ironic details about American life, money, power, and the rise of the industrial age.
As in the film, the last years are the most moving, as Benjamin ages toward infancy. Fitzgerald repeats, “he did not remember” several times, before all goes dark and Benjamin fades into the dark. The idea for the story, Fitzgerald noted in a letter, came from Mark Twain, although he has stated that Twain was never an influence on his work — indeed, there are no similarities in their writing. But unquestionably, it is the idea that carries this story forward and makes it one of Fitzgerald’s memorable efforts from his early writing years. To read his best work, however, we would have to turn to “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.”
Above from F. Scott Fitzgerald Newsletter, 2009
Anyone interested in the works and life of
F. Scott Fitzgerald is welcome.