"The Geranium" is an early short story by the American author Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

. 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

The Complete Stories (O'Connor)

The Complete Stories is a short story collection by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It comprises the stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, plus several previously unavailable stories.-Contents:*"The Geranium"*"The...

.

O'Connor was fond of the story and rewrote it into "An Exile in the East" (1954), "Getting Home" (1964), and "Judgement Day" (1964). As "Judgement Day

Judgement Day (short story)

"Judgement Day" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1965 in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor finished the collection during her final battle with lupus. She died in 1964, just before her final book was published. A devout Roman...

," it appeared as the final story of Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by Flannery O'Connor during her final illness. The title of the collection and of the short story of the same name is taken from a passage from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The collection was published...

in 1965. All four versions of the story were published together in Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft in 1993.

Further reading

• Asals, Frederick. Flannery O' Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.

• Darretta, John Lawrence. "From 'The Geranium' to 'Judgement Day': Retribution in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor." Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1987. 21–28.

• Giannone, Richard. "Flannery O'Connor's Consecration of the End." Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1987. 9–20.
• Gretlund, Jan Nordby. "Flannery O'Connor's 'An Exile in the East': An Introduction." South Carolina Review 11.1 (1978): 3–11.
• Larsen, Val. "Manor House and Tenement: Failed Communities South and North in 'The Geranium.'" Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 20 (1991): 88–103.

• Westarp, Karl-Heinz. "Flannery O'Connor's Development: An Analysis of the Judgment-Day Material." Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 1987. 46–54.
• ———, comp. Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft. Southern Literary Ser. 4. Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1993.
• Whitt, Margaret. "Letters to Corinth: Echoes from Greece to Georgia in O'Connor's 'Judgment Day.'" Literature and Belief 17.1–2 (1997): 61–74.
• Wood, Ralph C. "From Fashionable Tolerance to Unfashionable Redemption: A Reading of Flannery O'Connor's First and Last Stories." Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 7 (1978): 10–25.

• Wray, Virginia F. "Flannery O'Connor's Master's Thesis: Looking for Some Gestures." Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 8 (1979): 68–76.