This story was propelled by a comment of Mark Twain's such that it was a pity that the best piece of life came toward the start and the most exceedingly terrible part toward the end. By attempting the analysis upon just one man in a flawlessly typical world I have hardly given his thought a reasonable preliminary. Half a month in the wake of finishing it, I found a practically indistinguishable plot in Samuel Butler's "Journals."
The story was distributed in "Collier's" the previous summer and incited this surprising letter from an unknown admirer in Cincinnati:
"Sir- -
I have perused the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to state that as a short story essayist you would cause a decent insane person I to have seen numerous pieces of cheddar in my life however of all the pieces of cheddar I have ever observed you are the greatest piece. I prefer not to squander a piece of stationary on you however I will."