Is The Great Gatsby the best love tale ever written?

what a story wrote:

The Great Gatsby is a piece of magnificent writing.

The book impacted my life. It is why I am where I am today.

I don't think the book true a love story, however, although could think so given Gatsby's devotion to a dream. His dream ended in failure.

Stubbornly, I think the green light is not illusory, and I have lived to show it. My AP English teacher, an idiosyncratic and whimsical gay man who could not come out of the closet in that era, challenged me, one of the few athletes he taught in the AP class, to go beyond the broken dreams of Gatsby or Faulkner's Sutpen (Absalom). This may sound silly but I was a poor kid with a single unemployed divorced alcoholic mother and a terrifically abusive father attending a school of well off students. This teacher opened up a world of possibilities to me, in a way that running a 4:08 mile in high school never really did. He died two years ago in his 80's without knowing how much he did for me - something I regret. After my father constantly beat the crap out of me in middle school I took to the habit of walking constantly with my head down. This teacher caused me to look up. Literally.

I am from the Midwest and went to a so-called prestigious school in the East. I was really motivated to do well in this school, because I sure as heck did not want the rich kids to think I wasn't smart. I spent my college years like Nick Carraway, as an observer of the rich and connected, and while I did well academically, my experience was largely that of an outsider. Division 1 running didn't help, because it isolates you from other resources and activities in the school. I went on to a top ranked graduate school, and did better there academically than in undergrad, and achieved at a level higher than I did with running at any level. I don't think the chip on my shoulder ever lessened throughout my schooling days, though.

I got married without knowing how damaged and immature I was. The amount of humility required to see just how far I needed to go was significant. I am still married, but it is not easy. I stumbled along and raised two beautiful and successful daughters, with their having academic successes well in excess of my own. They have experienced none of the hardships or burdens I did - and that's a good thing.

There's rarely a day that goes by that I don't think of Fitzgerald's Gatsby and his vision of America, where dreams are made in dark fields of the republic. And in a sense it reminds me that there was some good in the Midwest for me.

I do feel absurd at times ascribing my trajectory in life to a novel and a great teacher teaching it. But there are things are odd, I suppose.