Blue Hotel

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