F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jazz Age prose you listen to for the sentences, since you already know how it ends.
F. Scott Fitzgerald earns his place in a sleep catalog on prose alone. The plots are famous and mostly sad; the sentences are the reason to be here. Both recordings are read by Elizabeth Grace on The Sleepy Bookshelf.
The Great Gatsby benefits at bedtime from being so widely known. There is no suspense left in a story most listeners met in school, so what remains is the surface: Nick's narration, the parties heard from across the lawn, the green light. Heard drowsily, it is closer to music than to plot, and the short length means a full listen fits inside a week of nights.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the single-evening option, Fitzgerald's 1922 tale of a Baltimore man born old who lives toward youth. The premise is strange but the telling is matter-of-fact, and time running backward turns out to be a soothing direction to travel.
