hero

A motto of his hero, Thomas Edison, is inscribed on a favorite sweatshirt : “To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” —Britt Robson, Mother Jones, May/June 2008

Greater authors—Arthur Conan Doyle most notably—have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King's Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. —Christopher Hitchens, New York Times Book Review, 12 Aug. 2007

Here's a novel by a decorated war hero with a fictional Middle Eastern desert war at its core. It pits an American-led coalition against a potentially lethal enemy … —Lorenzo Carcaterra, People, 3 June 1991

Other physicists, long wedded to the notion that nothing can escape from a black hole, have generally come to accept that discovery. And the stuff emitted from little black holes (and big ones too, but far more slowly) is now called Hawking radiation. “In general relativity and early cosmology, Hawking is the hero,” says Rocky Kolb, a physicist at Fermilab in Illinois. —Leon Jaroff, Time, 8 Feb. 1988

He returned from the war a national hero.

the hero of a rescue

She was a hero for standing up to the government.

His father has always been his hero.

He has always been a hero to his son.