If you're an ambitious novelist, you're trying for things that are beyond your measure.

Today, some of our most ambitious novelists are struggling to do the same thing - only a vast cultural and linguistic divide separates them from their chosen subjects, men like those who attacked the World Trade Center.

It is 20 years since Leon Edel published the fifth and last book of his heroic and largely successful attempt to encompass the portly form and complex character of America's most ambitious and innovative novelist.

Jonathan Dee (author of "The Lover of History," "The Liberty Campaign" and "St. Famous") is a consistently ambitious novelist.

The freedom that science fiction affords the ambitious novelist - freedom to create not just characters but entire civilizations and worlds - comes with a price.

"This is the mistake of an ambitious first-time novelist: I thought if I only got to write one book, I'd name the main character America, hoping that everybody would find a little bit of themselves in this character."

John Updike, reviewing Little Money Street in The New Yorker, described Eberstadt as "ambitious, resourceful novelist".

As well, he knows how to tell a story, and how to make us laugh, qualities not always present in the work of some of the more polished, more literary or ultimately more ambitious novelists of his generation.

John Fante - Dan Fante's father - started out as an ambitious and promising young novelist.

The father, an ambitious novelist played with morose delicacy by Bill Nighy, has removed his family to their crumbling castle where, he announces in a flashback, "I shall write masterpieces."