Cathedral — Raymond Carver (1983)

Raymond Carver's Cathedral marked a departure from his earlier "dirty realism" minimalism into something more open and even hopeful. The title story — a man who resents his wife's blind friend comes to understand something profound about sight and connection by helping him draw a cathedral — is the most frequently anthologised American short story of the last 40 years. Carver's spare prose and his sympathy for working-class lives changed American fiction permanently.