The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Fitzgerald was a member of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of expatriate artists in the interwar period who exerted a profound influence on culture and ideas. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway. Benjamin Button’s progress through life is marked by an alternating succession of war and peacetime, a reflection of the worldview shaping Fitzgerald and other postwar authors.

World War I was a cataclysm that defined the first decades of the 20th century. Millions of soldiers and civilians were killed, tens of millions more were injured, and countless scores on top of that were traumatized. The war inaugurated an era of technological and chemical warfare, contributing to the distinctly dehumanizing character of the conflict.

Fitzgerald, unlike his friend Hemingway, did not see combat. He enlisted and was mobilized to Alabama for training, but Armistice Day arrived before he was deployed overseas. The near-miss with the conflict colored his view of war and influenced his depictions of it in “Benjamin Button” and other works, including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Fitzgerald’s relationship with Hemingway, including the differences in their depictions of war and masculinity. Scholar James H.