Being me is when you go to do some grocery shopping and end up buying a copy of short stories by Francis Scott Fitzgerald in original for less then $2. The one that contains the famous The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
He's not my favorite writer, nor among the best examples of the written style I have seen, but he definitely holds a special place in my heart.
I first got to know him with a soviet print of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the night, which have left me in a bit strange feeling. My romantic 18 y.o. self really loved the Gatsby story, but I thought that the characters of the second book were a bit dumd and too snob.
But the gem, the last drop to tilt my internal scales into falling in love with him were the Echoes of the Jazz Age. A transcript of the era I tend to romantize the most, tender, loving, written by a man who lived the crazy golden time of jazz to its fullest, a person who knew it all from the inside, who has distilled the twenties through himself and reflected them on paper, who spoke in the name of all the beautiful and damned... The most heartbreakingly nostalgic story I ever read, dedicated to an era...