O’Connor wrote two fine novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her 31 short stories were collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Her first story to appear in print was published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature. ‘The Geranium’ (1946) is one of six stories gathered in her 1947 master’s thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, and it later appeared in the posthumous anthology The Complete Stories (1971).
In ‘The Geranium’ an elderly white Southerner moves to New York City, where he is surprised to find that the local blacks treat him as their social equal, a loss (form his perspective) of social status that prompts and increasing sense of his own inferiority and powerlessness. O’Connor reworked the story several times over the years and in 1993 four versions of the story were published together in Flannery O’Connor: The Growing Craft. These were ‘The Geranium’, ‘An Exile in the East’ (1954), ‘Getting Home’ (1964), and ‘Judgement Day,’ which was the last thing she ever wrote and the only one she approved for publication in her lifetime.
First published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature, 1946, and available to read online here; collected in The Complete Stories, 1971
