Dubliners — James Joyce (1914)

Joyce's 15 stories of Dublin life use what he called "scrupulous meanness" — precise, unadorned prose — to depict the paralysis of Irish society with devastating force. The final story, The Dead, is universally regarded as the greatest short story in the English language, ending with Gabriel Conroy's epiphany of universal mortality in one of prose fiction's most celebrated final paragraphs.