The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and <em>Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature</em> represents, in its author's words,"a report on ten years' watching of shadows." Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, <em>Gnomon</em> not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the development of Kenner's own body of work, which in its beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.