It was written in 1953 and published in the September 1953 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, appearing later in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955).
He has been invited to various public celebrations where he covets the attention, particularly, from beautiful women in the crowd, and he has an inflated image of himself despite his decrepit condition.
The General's 62-year-old granddaughter, Sally Poker, prays every night that he lives long enough to sit on the stage during her college graduation so that everyone can see her strong heritage and superiority.
[1] The story is loosely based upon a newspaper article about a Civil War veteran attending his wife's graduation that Flannery O'Connor read in the early 1950s.
It is also the only O'Connor story to deal explicitly with a subject that is important to the works of many Southern writers – the Civil War.