The rigor of modern academic criticism in the United States owes much to the efforts of Elder Olson and the other so-called Chicago or Neo-Aristotelian critics: R. S. Crane, W. R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Norman Maclean, and Bernard Weinberg. They aimed to elucidate the theoretical bases of commentaries on art, to distinguish sound from unsound principles and methods of critical reasoning, and to join issues with various myth, psychoanalytic, and New Critics. In a series of articles and books written in the middle decades of the twentieth century, these critics, Olson perhaps most prominently, did more than a little to raise the ante of critical discussion and to make the study of criticism and critical theory a rigorous, intellectual enterprise. In a review of Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952), treated by many as the Chicago manifesto, the New Critic John Crowe Ransom called Olson "their best man...