Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.
