The inspiration for the major motion picture starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett—plus eighteen other stories by the beloved author of The Great GatsbyIN THE TITLE STORY, a baby born in 1860 begins life as an old man and proceeds to age backward. F. Scott Fizgerald 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 original collection captures, with Fitzgerald's signature blend of enchantment and disillusionment, America during the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as ‘grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work): six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces. Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that ‘He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a “generation” … he might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.’