F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button & Six Other Stories
Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here - including 'The Cut-Glass Bowl' in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family's misfortunes, 'The Four Fists' where a man's life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of 'May Day'
About F. Scott Fitzgerald
The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton,Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald , and alcohol. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry.
Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship.
In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for a second time.
The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.
In 1919 Fitzgerald began his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. He interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.”
The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he wrote sober.
The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway— then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle — with whom he formed a friendship with.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrection — “revival” does not properly describe the process — occurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had achieved a secure place among America’s enduring writers.
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