A Study Guide for Stephen Crane 's "The Blue Hotel"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Stephen Crane 's "The Blue Hotel," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535835411

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11

The Blue Hotel

Stephen Crane

1898

Introduction

The Blue Hotel, by American author Stephen Crane, is a relatively long short story, almost a novella (or short novel) that tells of a fatal encounter in a saloon in 1890s Nebraska. The story was first published in two parts in Collier's Weekly magazine on November 26 and December 3, 1898, and was later included in Crane's 1899 collection The Monster, and Other Stories. Three other magazine publishers had rejected the story, and Collier's agreed to publish only a shortened version of it. Someone on the magazine's staff, though, mislaid the alternate version, so the full version was published.

The Blue Hotel bears many similarities to contemporary novels that were set in the Old West, complete with saloons, gunslingers, gamblers, and a general sense of danger and threat. The Blue Hotel, along with most of Crane's work, is regarded as an example of a type of nineteenth-century realism called naturalism. Naturalism can be described as a literary form that takes a harsh view of the human condition. The naturalist writers strove for objectivity and frankness. They were not afraid to deal with characters from the lower social orders who were victims of their environment. They took the position that the world can be amoral and people have no free will. They also tended to conceive that religious beliefs were illusory and that a person's destiny was likely to be that of a miserable life followed by an obscure death. Crane has been highly regarded for his vivid imagery, his use of irony, and his ability to puncture the illusions of his characters.

Author Biography

Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a Methodist minister in Newark, and his mother was a crusader in the temperance movement (which discouraged people from drinking alcohol). Both parents believed fervently in the existence of a benevolent God, in human free will, and in the importance of humanity in the universe—beliefs that Crane would come to reject. Crane's original ambition was to be a soldier, and to that end he attended a military preparatory school, but he withdrew in 1890 to attend Lafayette College, where he studied mining and engineering. Later he transferred to Syracuse