Raymond Carver said it was possible

to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring - with immense, even startling power.

Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see.

Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.