One of my favorite novels is Tobias Wolff’s “Old School,” which captures the yearning of a young man to meet his literary idols — particularly Ernest Hemingway, the author’s own boyhood hero. Wolff told me that his appreciation of Hemingway has grown over the years. “As you get older you understand how complicated were the lives of people you looked up to, and imagined were living untroubled and confident lives. So my feeling for Hemingway increased over the years because I no longer see him as just a legend or an icon, but as a deeply flawed, struggling human being. And I’m all the more in awe of what he managed to do with his talent, considering what he needed to get through every day to give it full rein.”

When I was an M.F.A. student studying fiction writing, we often critiqued a story by deciding whether it had “heart,” but what gives a piece heart is more than technical mastery. “You can read Mailer or Hemingway and see — or at least I do — that what separated them from greater writers (like Chekhov, say) was a certain failing of kindness or compassion or gentleness — an interest in the little guy, i.e., the nonglamorous little guy, a willingness and ability to look at all of their characters with love,” the writer George Saunders told me via e-mail.

Tobias Wolff was a literary hero to Saunders. “Toby was the first great writer I ever met and what the meeting did for me was disabuse me of the idea that a writer had to be a dysfunctional crazy person,” Saunders said. “Toby was loving, gentle, funny, kind, wise — yet he was producing these works of great (sometimes dark) genius. It was invigorating to be reminded that great writing was (1) mysterious and (2) not linked, in any reductive, linear way, to the way one lived: wild writing could come from a life that was beautifully under control. Watching him, I felt: O.K., nurture the positive human parts of yourself and hope they get into your work, eventually.”

Writers and their books will always be inextricably connected, but the relationship between them isn’t simple. As Saunders told me, “A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.”

Maybe, as a reader, that is what I keep falling in love with — not the author, but the art of reaching.