Five reasons 'Gatsby' is the great American novel

• %22The Great Gatsby%22 captured the Jazz Age%2C the gaudiest%2C most exciting period in American culture
• Every generation reads %22The Great Gatsby%22 with fresh eyes and new interpretations
• %22Gatsby%22 author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the most beautiful last line in literature

It's time to revisit that ultimate literary cage fight: Which classic deserves The Great American Novel victory belt. In March, a Publishers Weekly poll crowned To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Other factions agitated for Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Sound and the Fury and The Grapes of Wrath.

And with Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio opening in theaters Friday, F. Scott Fitzgerald fans are going to the mat for the 1925 classic which came in second to Harper Lee's title in the PW poll.

Set on Long Island and New York City, The Great Gatsby is narrated by 29-year-old Midwesterner Nick Carraway (played by Tobey Maguire in the film adaptation — the fifth — of the novel).

After coming East to learn the bond business in the summer of 1922, Nick reconnects with his cousin, a Southern debutante named Daisy (Carey Mulligan). She is the wife of Nick's racist Yale classmate, the staggeringly wealthy ex-football star Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).

Nick also becomes friendly with his neighbor, a mysterious millionaire named Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio). Gatsby's obsession with Daisy, whom he loved as a young Army officer stationed in Louisville right before World War I, fuels this tale of longing and loss, of dreams and disillusion.

Here are five reasons why The Great Gatsby should rank as The Great American Novel:

1.It's the most American of stories. Encoded at the very center of our national DNA is admiration for the self-made success story, the mythic figure who pursues and fulfills his dream — someone like Jay Gatsby, a "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" who rises from obscure poverty to immense wealth.

"It's the Great American Dream," says Jeff Nilsson, historian for the bimonthly The Saturday Evening Post. Between 1920 and 1937, the magazine published 68 of Fitzgerald's short stories, and has just issued a collection called F.Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby's Girls featuring the first eight stories in book form.

"It is the story that if you work hard enough, you can succeed."

Leading Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III agrees. He calls The Great Gatsby "a national scripture. It embodies the American spirit, the American will to reinvent oneself."

West says it is no coincidence that The Great Gatsby is probably the American novel most often taught in the rest of the world. "It is our novel, how we present ourselves. ... He captured and distilled the essence of the American spirit."

YetGatsby also explores the dream's destructive power. "Americans pay a great price for that dream," says Nilsson.

The Great Gatsby also captures money's power to corrupt, to let the rich escape from the consequences of their actions. Here's Fitzgerald's description of that original 1% couple: "They were careless people — Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money …"

2. The romance of the Roaring '20s.Fitzgerald was the poet laureate of what he named "The Jazz Age," the most raucous, gaudy era in U.S. history.

"The 1920s is the most fascinating era in American culture," says Nilsson. "Everything was changing so much." Youth in revolt didn't start at Woodstock, it began with Gertrude Stein's "Lost Generation."

It was flappers, cars, sex, movies, gangsters, celebrities, a stock market minting money, everything awash in illegal booze. The wildest parties and bad behavior among the rich and famous today have nothing on the you-only-live-once hedonism depicted in The Great Gatsby.

3. It remains relevant. West, an English literature professor at Pennsylvania State University, has been teaching the book to college students for decades. He marvels how "it never seems to lose its modernity; it has that kind of staying power." Distracted as they might be by other classes, not to mention hormones, his students "really do bear down on this novel … It becomes 'their novel.' It's an unfailing delight to teach."

One reason: It offers complicated characters who can be interpreted in fresh ways for new readers. Is Nick in love with Gatsby, as Greg Olear theorized on Salon? Could Gatsby — the other, the outsider — actually be a black man? Often dismissed as a selfish ditz, is Daisy victimized by a society that offers her no career path except marriage to big bucks?

At a recent press conference, the actor who plays Gatsby noted its relevancy today. "It is one of those novels that is talked about nearly 100 years later for a reason," says DiCaprio who first read Gatsby when he was 15. "It's incredibly nuanced and it's existential and at the center of this movie is this man who is incredibly hollow."

4. Crazy love. What makes Gatsby magical is his motivation. Although he's made his fortune as a bootlegger and gambler, greed doesn't drive him. Rather he's on a quest to reclaim Daisy.

Still, The Great Gatsby isn't a romance about how a nice millionaire almost wins back the girl of his dreams. It's about a narcissistic obsession with the past. To Gatsby, Daisy isn't a married woman with a daughter. She's an object, something he lost and wants back. Which makes his actions — such as buying a mansion across the water from the Buchanans so he can stare at the green light at the end of their dock — well, kind of creepy and stalker-like.

5. Imperishable prose. Forget the critics, the theories, even the characters. For Fitzgerald's fans, it's the language. "Fitzgerald had a pitch-perfect ear," says West. "There's not one flabby sentence," says Nilsson.

For evocative beauty, what can ever beat the last line of The Great Gatsby, which is engraved on the Rockville, Md., grave the author and his wife Zelda share. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."