The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is not actually a book, but more of a short story contained in a collection called Tales of the Jazz Age.  After having just watched the movie, I decided to read the story. It was a quick read; it probably took about an hour to read the whole thing. I was wondering how they could make an almost 3 hour long movie from a short story and here is the answer: the only thing similar between the two is that Benjamin Button ages backwards.  Everything else is completely different.

In this story, Benjamin is born in 1860 in Baltimore, Maryland right before the Civil War to a hardware retailer. His father arrives at the hospital and the doctors and nurses are just horrified by what has been born and when the father says who he is everyone treats him scornfully.  The baby is an old man and when he can talk he asks his father for a cane.  Unlike the movie, the father doesn’t give Benjamin up, but instead dyes his hair to make him appear younger.  One kind of racist thing in this story (of course you have to think about the time it was published, 1922) is when the father is walking with Benjamin by a slave trader he secretly wishes his son had been born black so he could get rid of him.

At age 18 Benjamin tries to enroll into Yale College, but he has run out of hair dye.  He goes to the interview with his natural hair, he probably looks like he is in his 50′s or 60′s, and is basically thrown off the campus. No one believes he is freshman age. It’s kind of funny that the Yale freshman taunt him to go to Harvard.  Shortly after this he gets married to the daughter of a general, Hildegarde.  Their marriage goes along fine at first and then Benjamin tires of her so he enlists in the army for the Spanish American War.

The story further documents the exploits of Benjamin as he grows older in age and younger in appearance. He has a son who he soon bypasses as in he looks the same age as his son and then starts to look younger than his son.  His son in his thirties doesn’t want anything to do with Benjamin as he is an embarrassment to the family looking like a teenager.  No one seems to understand nor want to believe that Benjamin can’t control what happens to him and they all seem to think he is doing this on purpose.  That part is very strange.  It is a very interesting story though and night and day different from everything that happens in the movie.

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