The Geranium


"The Geranium" is an early short story by the American author Flannery O'Connor. It was first published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature in 1946 and is one of the six stories included in O'Connor's 1947 master's thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories. It later appeared in the 1971 collection The Complete Stories.
O'Connor was fond of the story and rewrote it into "An Exile in the East", "Getting Home", and "Judgement Day". As "Judgement Day," it appeared as the final story of Everything That Rises Must Converge in 1965. All four versions of the story were published together in Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft in 1993.