Benjamin Button begins life as a 70-year-old man, and then things start to get weird.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, today on the Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.

A new vintage episode is released every Tuesday.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers will continue episodically every Friday.

Please help us to continue producing amazing audio books

by going to Classic Tales audiobooks.com and becoming a

supporter. Thank you so much. Today's story originally appeared in Collier's magazine

on May 27th, 1922.

It was later included in the Short Story Collection,

Tales of the Jazz Age.

The story was later adapted to a film in 2008 and a musical in 2019.

This story was recorded when a listener reached out to me from New Orleans and told me that they

were filming a movie in her neighborhood based on this short story.

And now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1.

As long ago was 1860, it was the proper thing to be born at home.

At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed

that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one.

So young Mr and Mrs. Roger Button were 50 years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860,

that their first baby should be born in a hospital.

Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred and let you judge for yourself.

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial,

...