Why are we forced to read The Great Gatsby, an 85 year old book?

You are there to learn ideas, something that Twilight is mostly deficient in. There is a reason that some of the older writers are referred to as the the 'Masters'. Now, had you mentioned Chinua Achebe, Elie Weisel, JD Salinger, Thomas Pynchon or Robert Penn Warren as writers you would replace Fitzgerald with, maybe even Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Nadine Gordimer or Jim Harrison or Louise Erdrich, I might believe you had a point, but the age of the book has nothing to do with it.