My favorite first-year calculus text by far is Michael Spivak's Calculus. When I was in school in the 1970s, he was by common consensus THE great and differentiated writer of math books -- but that was based on a small sample size, and Calculus is the only one that should be in this discussion.

There were a lot of other books back then that I think of as likely to have been the best in their time, but those were all more in the vein of texts for classes that I just happened to feel served me well.