Because "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" appears so intensely personal, for all the reasons given or suggested above, it is difficult to cite a fictional work that might easily be tagged as a literary precedent.

Michael W. Schaefer comments on this point, in his chapter on the story, in The Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Stephen Crane (1996). Given the rich body of biographical material to be dealt with, Schaefer writes, "few critics have" made the effort to dig up literary sources for this story. The most obvious ones might perhaps more properly be termed sub-literary—the host of dime-novel Westerns that were so popular in Crane's day, the conventions of which regarding showdowns between bloodthirsty badmen and noble, straight-shooting marshals he deftly subverts here.