The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922) In 1860 Benjamin Button is born an old man and mysteriously begins aging backward. At the beginning of his life he is withered and worn, but as he continues to grow younger he embraces life—he goes to war, runs a business, falls in love, has children, goes to college and prep school, and, as his mind begins to devolve, he attends kindergarten and eventually returns to the care of his nurse. This strange and haunting story embodies the sharp social insight that has made Fitzgerald one of the great voices in the history of American literature. In 2008 Benjamin Button was adapted into a film starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. About the author F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel,This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim. That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. (See LitCourse 5 with Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" for an idea of their life.) To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labeled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald movedto Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night. He died there of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44. The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald inA Moveable Feast with: His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland. Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more. Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly. Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood. Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died. He was 44.

Download a copy here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6695

Other interesting information: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/mar/03/short-story-scott-fitzgerald

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-margaret-daniel/happy-birthday-f-scott-fi_b_3975643.html

Topics for Discussion How does Fitzgerald use tone and style to create a world that is fantastical and dreamlike, yet realistic? How does Fitzgerald employ humor in the story? In what ways is the idea of someone aging in reverse inherently humorous? By the time Benjamin takes over his father’s company, his relationship with his father is dramatically different. Fitzgerald writes, “And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.” Benjamin’s reverse aging is responsible for many of the highs and lows of his relationships with his father and his son. Do you think these relationships in some ways parallel those of all fathers and sons? How does this story, though written almost a century ago, reflect our society’s current attitude toward age and aging? What is ironic about Benjamin marrying a “younger” woman? What does the story reveal about our perceptions of age and beauty? The happier Benjamin becomes in his career, the more strained his marriage grows. Fitzgerald writes, “And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his wife had ceased to attract him.” Why does he fall out of love with Hildegarde? How does Fitzgerald use Benjamin’s condition to ridicule social norms? How does Benjamin’s reverse aging ironically mirror the modern midlife crisis? When Benjamin returns from the war, Hildegarde, annoyed with his increasingly youthful appearance, says, “You’re simply stubborn. You think you don’t want to be like any one else. . . But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do—what would the world be like?” Later Fitzgerald writes of Roscoe, “It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a ‘red-blooded he-man’ . . . but in a curious and perverse manner.” What is significant about their attitudes? How is it ironic that Hildegarde and Roscoe seem to believe that Benjamin should control his aging? Why do you think that fantasy and stories that manipulate time are so popular in our culture at the moment? What are some of the films, TV shows, and books that reflect these trends? Are you a fan of fantasy and stories that play with time, or do you prefer more traditional forms of storytelling?

The Swimmer by John Cheever

About the author and the story Born in 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Cheever grew up with only his mother and older brother, Fred, after his bankrupted father abandoned the family. At seventeen, he was expelled from high school for smoking. He wrote a short story called “Expelled” about the experience, which he sold to the New Republic, then moved to Boston, where he lived with his brother and wrote. Eventually he moved to New York City, where he lived on next to nothing while he worked on his stories. He published a short story in the New Yorker when he was twenty-three, the first of his 121 appearances in the magazine. In 1938, Cheever joined the army and fought in World War II, but he continued writing and publishing stories. He published his first collection, The Way Some People Live, in 1943. In 1941, Cheever married Mary Winternitz, with whom he had three children, Susan, Benjamin, and Frederico. Both Susan and Ben Cheever eventually became writers themselves. After Benjamin was born, Cheever and his family moved from the Upper East Side of New York City to the suburb of Westchester County, New York, where Cheever was immersed in a landscape that he would incorporate into much of his writing. It was here that Cheever began struggling with excessive drinking, a problem that would plague him for many years to come and all but destroy his life. Not surprisingly, alcohol figures prominently in almost all of his fiction. Cheever wrote and published stories and novels steadily throughout his life, and his deep, razor-sharp focus on life in suburban America led critic John Leonard to dub him “the Chekhov of the suburbs.” Cheever published his second story collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, in 1953, followed by The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1959); Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961); and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964). His novels and novellas include The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), which won the National Book Award, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park(1969), Falconer (1977), and Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). In 1978, The Stories of John Cheever, a monumental collection of Cheever’s work, won the Pulitzer Prize. “The Swimmer” appeared in the collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow and is considered to be one of Cheever’s best short stories. In 1968, director Frank Perry adapted the story for a film starring Burt Lancaster, which brought the already-famous Cheever even greater renown. Cheever wrote and published the story when alcohol had begun to take over his life. In the years that followed, he destroyed many personal and professional relationships and stopped writing almost completely. Although he taught at both Boston University and the University of Iowa during this time, he was barely functioning. He was suicidal, made drunken scenes in public, and became intolerable to live with. In 1975, he checked himself into a rehab clinic and later stayed sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1982, Cheever died from cancer in Ossining, New York. He was seventy.

Download a copy here: https://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2F202.121.96.130%2FDownload%2F20091207184417_734640623434.pdf&ei=0pwEU8jOMZT20gWc14DYBw&usg=AFQjCNHomcYC3-OlAYRvzBMn5iWyUl40iQ&sig2=Xrgvp-LiyI9FTXkP-acQYw&bvm=bv.61535280,d.d2k

Other interesting information: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/16/short-story-john-cheever http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/18/john-cheever-blake-bailey Watch the film (not free): http://www.amazon.com/The-Swimmer-Burt-Lancaster/dp/B002B790YC

Topics for Discussion Who is referred to by the word "everyone" in the opening sentence? Who is not? How does Neddy Merrill relate to the world in which he moves? Why does he decide to swim home? Why does Neddy name his route "the Lucinda River"? The Levys live on "Alewives Lane." Alewives are a kind of fish that swim up rivers to spawn. Is there a sexual component to Neddy's journey? Is the storm that breaks a surprise? How does Neddy feel about the beginning of the rain? What differences can be noticed between what Neddy experiences before and after the storm? How might they be explained? What new elements enter the story when Neddy crosses Route 424? Why do the drivers jeer at him? Before he dives into the unappealing public swimming pool, Neddy tells himself "that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River." How characteristic is this effort to assuage his own doubts and discontents? Based on what the Hallorans, the Sachses, the Biswangers, and Shirley Adams say to Neddy, what is the truth about himself and his life of which he is unaware? Cheever has his hero discover the season by observing the stars. What effect does that choice among various possibilities have on our attitude toward Neddy? It is not difficult to say what Neddy has lost. What has he gained? Explain why Neddy Merrill talks only with women.