The primary social concern in Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel," set in a very small Nebraska prairie town called Fort Romper (probably Omaha), is the plight of the stranger in the midst of a seemingly threatening group of "insiders" whose ways and attitude toward the stranger are difficult to understand, even though there is no language problem.

The story shows how easily such a stranger's failure to understand "the lay of the land" may lead to personal exasperation and then to some act of violence—by, or upon the person of, the stranger. Under such conditions of social tension, something as seemingly innocent as a card game played for fun may turn ugly and cause a life-threatening situation.

Another social concern is the easy morality of small towns on the Western frontier in the late nineteenth century.

There was, first, the proneness to physical violence...