Recently the basis for a major motion picture starring Hollywood golden boy Brad Pitt, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was written in 1922 by the golden boy of early twentieth-century American fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of such era-defining masterworks as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. The tale follows the travails and triumphs of the title character, who is born in the body of an elderly man and becomes

F. Scott Fitzgerald makes anti-bellum Baltimore his setting for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantastical tale with some Poe-like overtones about a baby born at age seventy who then lives life in reverse, his hair turning "in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray, the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced." What ramifications that creates for Benjamin's relationship with his father first and then