Benjamin Button is born an old man — wrinkled, white-haired, and demanding a cigar in the delivery room. As the decades pass, he does not age. He grows younger, watching the world race past him in the wrong direction: forced out of his career as his colleagues finally accept him, falling out of love as his wife grows older while he grows into a boy. Fitzgerald's strange, wistful fable turns the arc of an entire life upside down and asks an unsettling question: if you knew exactly how backward it would all go, would you dare to live it anyway? Sharp, funny, and quietly devastating, this is the story that inspired a generation of imitators — and none of them got the ending as right as the original.
