It is rare that an author is given the privilege of creating a work that defines a whole age. It happened to Dante with his "Comedy," but I think that Ursula Le Guin had the same privilege when she wrote his "EarthSea" cycle, starting in 1968. It is a cycle that encompasses and defines the whole 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
It is especially impressive how in the last volume of the first series, "The Farthest Shore," Le Guin managed to describe exactly the current situation, where humans are so desperate to avoid death that they can renounce to everything that makes them human for a false hope of immortality
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