The Blue Hotel: Short Story

Owner of The Blue Hotel, Patrick Scully, one day welcomes three new arrivals— an Easterner, a cowboy, and a Swede. The Swede is visibly nervous despite Scully’s kindness, and the bewildered reception his tactless outbursts get does nothing to calm the foreigner’s nerves, setting the stage for a violent confrontation later in the day.

A story about isolation and the power of communities to welcome or exclude individual, Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” is an example of early literary expressionism. It was first published in Collier’s Weekly in 1898 and later collected in The Monster and Other Stories.

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