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Informationen zum Autor F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, leaving in 1917 to join the army. His body of work includes five novels-including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night -and several volumes of short stories and autobiographical pieces. Coralie Bickford-Smith is an award-winning designer at Penguin Books (U.K.), where she has created several highly acclaimed series designs. She studied typography at Reading University and lives in London. Klappentext 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' sees a baby born in 1860 begin life as an old man and then age backwards. F. Scott Fitzgerald hinted at this kind of inversion when he called his era 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. Perhaps nowhere in American fiction has this 'Lost Generation' been more vividly preserved than in Fitzgerald's short fiction. Spanning the early twentieth-century American landscape, this collection captures, with Fitzgerald's signature blend of enchantment and disillusionment, America during the Jazz Age. THE JELLY-BEAN Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line. Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two--a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia, occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago. Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound--rather like the beginning of a fairy story--as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sorts of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. "Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the un-dissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular--I am idling, I have idled, I will idle. Jim was born in a white house on a green corner. It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim's father scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul. He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sort of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, ...
About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summary
'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' sees a baby born in 1860 begin life as an old man and then age backwards. F. Scott Fitzgerald hinted at this kind of inversion when he called his era 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. Perhaps nowhere in American fiction has this 'Lost Generation' been more vividly preserved than in Fitzgerald's short fiction. Spanning the early twentieth-century American landscape, this collection captures, with Fitzgerald's signature blend of enchantment and disillusionment, America during the Jazz Age.
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A master of the American short story Philadelphia Enquirer
