She died before she was 40, leaving behind a body of blazingly original short fiction set in America’s segregated south. But her reputation has been tarnished by accusations of racism. Amonth before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O’Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.” The “wolf” that O’Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can...