"The Blue Hotel" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...

 (1871–1900). The story first appeared in the 1899 collection entitled The Monster and Other Stories. It is perhaps the most widely-read of all the tales in the collection and while it may seem, on the surface, to be a rather straightforward story about a man who gets in trouble after a stay at the Palace Hotel, there are several complex themes that drive the work and in some ways, define many of the overarching themes in novels like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is an 1893 novel by American author Stephen Crane. Often called a novella because of its short length, it was Crane's first published book of fiction. Because the work was considered too risqué by publishers, Crane, who was 21 years old at the time, had to finance...

and more generally, of Crane’s entire body of work. Stylistically, this work breaks away from the standards of the time, often delving into the realms of Expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

, a style not readily found in the American literary Canon. This experimentation of form further augments the argument of his legacy amongst the literary giants of the American modernist movement.

External links

• "The Blue Hotel" fulltext at UVA Library