What They’re Made Of

It’s often said these days that journalists like to build up heroes so they can tear them down. That’s a bit of a misunderstanding. What journalists appreciate about heroes is the kind of journey they’re on. It makes a great story, not least because the hero is taking a dangerous new path, fraught with setbacks and surprises. But it’s the third act that really makes the story newsworthy, when “the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man,” as Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this magazine we bring you 20 such stories of heroes and icons, our choices of the people whose personal journeys were the most inspirational and provocative of the century. It’s the fifth of our TIME 100 special issues profiling the era’s most influential people. A complete list can be found after our Letters section.

You might think, given the way some people have talked lately about the lack of heroes, that it would be hard to find any who stand up to scrutiny. That’s a misunderstanding too. What’s true is that we don’t have any more of those all-purpose heroes, the king or teacher or paragon who is right and true all the time. But we do have plenty of people with heroic passages in their life, who bravely shatter a limitation or convention and open up new possibilities in the life of others. As we at TIME selected our heroes, we found a pattern: the ones who changed society the most were those who liberated a segment of humanity that had been fenced in by prejudice. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball; Helen Keller demolished old notions about the blind and deaf; and Harvey Milk dared to put himself on the ballot as an openly gay candidate. On his fourth try, he won.

Some heroes took a giant leap for all humankind by journeys that were lonely by definition. The flight of Charles Lindbergh and the climb of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay showed where people can go on the planet if they have the wit and endurance. Their journeys were inward too, as all heroic endeavors are, but few in the century were more so than those undertaken by Anne Frank in her diary of the Holocaust, or Bill Wilson, who pioneered the 12-step approach to self-help that has transformed millions of lives.

It’s not enough for a would-be hero to have talent and persistence. A real hero must have a kind of professionalism about the job, a desire to deliver for those who watch. Muhammad Ali did it with his sweetness and sass, Mother Teresa with her saintly stubbornness. America’s G.I.s showed a selfless commitment to a larger cause.

We included in our survey another kind of exemplar: the icon, the embodiment of an ideal that affects the way we live or act, for better or worse. Marilyn Monroe, the paramount platinum goddess, became an indelible work of Pop art. The Kennedys gave off an aura in which Americans basked, happy to think that the U.S. had become a place where you could grow up to be royalty. Princess Diana, conversely, became a symbol of Everywoman’s search for happiness.

Now we’ll begin the task of picking a Person of the Century. And later this year we’ll launch a series of issues called Visions, in which we pose (and try our best to answer) 100 provocative questions about the 21st century. We invite you to write us, e-mail us or visit our website at time.com to offer your nominees.

Stephen Koepp, Executive Editor