Khalil Gibran

Born in the Maronite village of Bsharri in the mountains of northern Lebanon, Gibran emigrated to Boston with his mother and siblings in 1895. He returned briefly to Beirut to study at the Maronite-run Madrasat al-Hikmah, where he absorbed both classical Arabic literature and the Christian mystical tradition, before settling permanently in New York in 1912.

Gibran wrote in two languages and in two registers. His Arabic prose poems and short fiction — Al-Arwah al-Mutamarrida (Spirits Rebellious, 1908), Al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (Broken Wings, 1912), Dam‘a wa Ibtisama (A Tear and a Smile, 1914) — placed him at the centre of the Mahjar movement, the loose circle of Arabic-language writers in the Americas who reshaped Arabic literature from outside the Arab world. His attacks on clerical and feudal authority in those early Arabic books were strong enough to get them burned in Beirut and to earn him excommunication from the Maronite church.

He is far better known in English for The Prophet (1923), a book of twenty-six prose-poem essays delivered by a fictional sage named Almustafa on the eve of his departure from a foreign city. It has never gone out of print, has been translated into more than a hundred languages, and was — for much of the twentieth century — the second-best-selling book in American history after the Bible. Critical opinion has always been divided; Gibran's rhetorical, King-James-inflected English seemed to the modernists of his own day already dated, but the book's ethical clarity and quiet hostility to institutional religion has kept finding new readers.

Gibran also painted — heavily influenced by Symbolism and by Auguste Rodin, whom he met in Paris — and the visual imagination of his books is inseparable from the painterly one. He died in New York at 48 of cirrhosis and tuberculosis, and was buried at the monastery of Mar Sarkis above Bsharri, where his house is now a museum.

Gibran sits at a hinge in Arabic literary history: the Mahjar writers in general, and Gibran in particular, made it normal for Arabic prose to be lyrical, philosophical, and personal in a way that the strict classical inheritance did not encourage.