Collier’s The National Weekly [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button].

FITZGERALD, F. Scott.

$950.00

Item Number: 145484

New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, May 27, 1922.

First edition of volume 69 of this weekly general interest magazine, with the first appearance of Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Small folio, original wrappers, illustrated with black and white photographs, advertisements, and illustrations by H. M. Stoops, R.F. Schabelitz, Jack Flanagan, and others. Scarce first appearance of Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg, beginning at page 5 and continuing from page 22 to page 28. In near fine condition, an antiquarian library label and embossment to the front panel. Rare.

Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics for the American national anthem 'The Star-Spangled Banner' in 1814. F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, 'This Side of Paradise,' in 1920, which displayed a sophisticated cynicism masking keen psychological insight and sensitivity to the falseness of the ideals of the so-called 'jazz era' in America, following World War I. Fitzgerald continued to write on this theme in two volumes of short stories, 'Flappers and Philosophers' and 'Tales of the Jazz Age.' With the publication of 'The Great Gatsby,' the story of a gross and ostentatious man who gained immense material success but who destroyed himself and those around him in the process, F. Scott Fitzgerald's full powers as a novelist were revealed; he was ranked by many critics as one of the pre-eminent American writers. In his later writings, as exemplified by the short story collections 'All the Sad Young Men' and 'Taps at Reveille,' and the novel 'Tender is the Night,' his central theme shifted to what he deemed the inevitable corruption of the individual by the blind crassness of modern society.