Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist who wrote in both Arabic and English. His English-language book The Prophet, published in 1923, has sold many millions of copies and been translated into more than a hundred languages. [1] In Arabic letters he was a central figure of the mahjar, the emigrant literary movement that helped modernise Arabic prose and poetry in the early twentieth century. [2]
Early life and emigration
Gibran Khalil Gibran was born on 6 January 1883 in Bsharri, a village in the mountains of what was then Ottoman-ruled Lebanon, into a Maronite Christian family. The household was poor, and in 1895 his mother took the children to the United States, settling in the immigrant quarter of Boston's South End. [1]
A school registrar's shortening of his name produced the form Kahlil Gibran that he used in English. His artistic talent attracted the attention of the photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day, who introduced him to Boston literary circles. In 1898 Gibran returned to Beirut to study Arabic literature at the Collège de la Sagesse, coming back to Boston in 1902 to a series of family bereavements that took his sister, his half-brother and his mother within about a year. [3]
Art and early writing
Gibran established himself first as a draughtsman and painter, holding early exhibitions in Boston. The educator Mary Haskell became his patron and editor, a role she sustained for the rest of his life, funding two years of study in Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian and absorbed the influence of Symbolist art. [1]
His early books, written in Arabic, include Nymphs of the Valley, Spirits Rebellious and the novella Broken Wings (1912). They combine romantic narrative with sharp criticism of clerical authority and of the treatment of women, and their loosened, direct prose style was influential among Arabic readers. [2]
New York and The Prophet
Gibran moved to New York City in 1911 and began writing increasingly in English, publishing The Madman in 1918 and The Forerunner in 1920. In 1920 he helped found the Pen League with Mikhail Naimy, Ameen Rihani and other Arab writers in America, an association that became the focus of the mahjar movement. [4]
The Prophet appeared in 1923. Framed as the parting counsel of a sage named Almustafa to the people of a city he is leaving, its twenty-six short chapters address love, marriage, children, work, joy and death in cadenced prose influenced by scripture. [3] Reviewers were largely indifferent, but the book sold steadily and found a very wide readership, particularly in the 1960s.
Later years and legacy
Gibran continued to write and paint, producing Sand and Foam, Jesus, the Son of Man and The Earth Gods. His health declined, and he died in New York on 10 April 1931 at the age of forty-eight. In accordance with his wishes his body was returned to Lebanon and buried at Bsharri, where a monastery he had hoped to acquire now houses the Gibran Museum. [1]
Gibran's reputation stands differently in his two languages: in Arabic he is studied as a reformer of literary style and an early modernist voice, while in English he is known chiefly through the enduring popularity of a single book. [2]
