F.Scott Fitzgerald

His studies seemed harder to him—he felt that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas's, the famous preparatory school... and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas's, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him.

And then he remembered nothing.

Hildegarde... appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. ..."Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I look younger than ever."

When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed...

Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles—he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father.

Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something everyday, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.

There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana... and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were sleepy—there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors' wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.

He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded.

When he was five he was sent to kindergarten... He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the middle of... tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. [They] told their friends that they felt he was too young.

[E]very one agreed with General Moncrief that it was "criminal" for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published his son's birth certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.

His social activities... interfered to some extent with his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.

[O]ne day a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror, Benjamin made... an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes deceive him, or had his hair turned... from white to iron-gray... Was the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer..? He could not tell. He knew that he no longer stooped, and that his physical condition had improved...