The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A doctor descends the steps of a Baltimore hospital rubbing his hands, and refuses to say what has happened, because upstairs, crammed into one of the cribs and wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, sits an old man of seventy with a long smoke-coloured beard who would like a cigar. Fitzgerald built the story from a remark of Mark Twain's, that the best of life comes at the beginning and the worst at the end, then followed the joke much further than a joke should go.