Ronald Salmon Crane was the leader and moving spirit of the Chicago School of Neo-Aristotelian criticism, the formalist movement which--together with its rival formalism, the New Criticism--shifted the center of the American literary scholar's vocation away from the historical and biographical penumbra of literature to the direct exegesis of the text itself. The outpouring, over the last fifty years, of books about theory, of books about other books, thus owes a great deal to the force of Crane's arguments about humanistic education. But it owes very little to his example. For R. S. Crane himself was, paradoxically enough, a parsimonious publisher, fond of telling his students that most books could be recast as articles, most articles as footnotes. Crane was true to his own laconic principles: he wrote only one treatise, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), as a standard theoretical book. The principal part...