“You failed to recognize the hero in your soul,” says John Galt, “and you failed to recognize me when I passed you in the street.” Preserving the hero in one’s soul, in life, is an ongoing endeavor. In fiction, however, that act can be a crystallized dramatic moment: Cyrano de Bergerac tells Roxane that “there comes one moment, once, and God help those who pass that moment by!”

This course explores short stories in which protagonists confront the responsibility to be self-made heroes. Each story spotlights a character at a crossroads, with the urgent need to identify values, and either to uphold these values, or abandon them. By sharing that perspective, we witness moments both intimate and significant. In classic fiction by Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, we see the dignity of self-reverence, the tragedy of self-betrayal and the solemnity of the choice.