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 expressi...