Kahlil Gibran

Lebanese-American · 1883 to 1931

Born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān on January 6, 1883, in the village of Bsharri in Mount Lebanon under Ottoman rule, the son of a tax collector imprisoned for embezzlement and Kamila Rahmeh, a priest's daughter, Kahlil Gibran spent his earliest years in poverty. In June 1895 his mother left her husband and sailed for Boston with her four children, settling in the second-largest Syrian community in the United States. A teacher at his immigrant school noticed his drawings and brought him to the photographer and publisher F. Holland Day, who introduced the boy to Boston's avant-garde. Sent back to Beirut at fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse, he returned to Boston in 1902 only to lose his sister, his half-brother, and his mother to tuberculosis within a year. With the support of his patron and lifelong correspondent Mary Haskell, Gibran studied painting in Paris from 1908 to 1910, returning to America to settle in a small Greenwich Village studio he called the Hermitage. His first English book, The Madman, appeared in 1918. The Prophet, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1923, is the address of a wise man named Almustafa to the people of Orphalese on the day he is to leave them by ship, twenty-six prose poems on love, marriage, work, children, joy and sorrow. It became one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, translated into more than a hundred languages. He never returned to Lebanon. He died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis on April 10, 1931, in New York, at the age of forty-eight, having bequeathed all future royalties from his books to his birthplace of Bsharri.