In Crane's slum novels the primary community facing crisis is the nuclear family; the nuclear family also plays a role in The Third Violet and Active Service. Family relations are so interwoven with relations to a larger community, in each of these works, that is is hard to say where one set ends and another begins. The same applies to the works in this chapter, “The Monster,” “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and Tales of Whilomville. In the first, the rescue of an only child leads to disruptions affecting not merely the family but the entire neighboring population. The second work turns largely on the manner in which a father and son deal with one stranger who is difficult and another who is diffident. In the third work the family, in the form of the newlywed couple, comes into being in a way that will alter forever the community that has existed up till now. Finally, Tales of Whilomville portrays crises not only within particular families but within communities of peers who are mainly children and mainly males. In all these respects the writings considered here differ from a number of other works in which crises are experienced by spontaneous, small, and temporary groups in a way that directly addresses the question of fraternity.

“Now, ‘The Blue Hotel’ goes in neatly with ‘The Monster’ and together they make 32,000” (Letters, p. 172).