The Geranium

"The Geranium" is an early short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was originally published in 1946 in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature and is one of the six stories included in O'Connor's 1947 master's thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories. It was later republished in O'Connor's posthumous anthology The Complete Stories (1971). In the story, an aging white Southerner moves to New York City, where he realizes that unlike the Jim Crow South, the local blacks treat him as their social equal. His loss of relative status accentuates his growing sense of inferiority and powerlessness.

O'Connor was fond of the story and attempted to rework it several times as her skills matured. However, she approved only one of those revisions – "Judgement Day" – for publication during her lifetime. She completed "Judgement Day" one month before her death in August 1964, and it was included as the final story of her posthumous collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

In 1993, four versions of the story – "The Geranium", "An Exile in the East" (1954), "Getting Home" (1964), and "Judgement Day" – were published together in Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft.