Nine Stories — J.D. Salinger (1953)

J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories contains A Perfect Day for Bananafish — one of the most analysed short stories of the 20th century, in which a soldier meets a little girl on the beach before returning upstairs and shooting himself — and For Esme with Love and Squalor, which Hemingway called the finest short story written about World War II. Salinger's use of the Glass family across multiple stories created one of fiction's most elaborately developed fictional families.