It feels like you're asking for a literary canon, but really, I don't think there is one any more. Things are a lot more wide-open, with a lot less dead-white-male worship.
In terms of books that were really important to me (not that I'm a literary writer, but I tend to be a literary reader)... they've changed as time goes on. When I first read The Color Purple I was blown away by the dialect and the honesty, but it's not a book I've gone back to very often. I love re-reading Austen (Persuasion is my favourite) but I'm reading for the characters, not for the writing style, so I'm really not sure they'd help someone trying to read as a writer, rather than as a reader.
I agree with the other poster who suggested you try to narrow things down a little. Literary Fiction is a really broad category, but it can be broken down into sub-categories that might make more sense for you. Different cultural groups have different prominent writers - if you're African American, you should probably read Walker, Angelou, Morrison, Hughes, Wright, Du Bois, etc.. And it certainly wouldn't hurt for anyone else to read them, but if you're writing magical realism you might focus on just Morrison from that list and come to the others later, after you've read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami.
If you're writing some other sub-genre, I'd say you want to focus on other authors. So, really, it's pretty hard to pick one list that's going to be useful to everyone. Never hurts to read some Shakespeare, though!