Prophet

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was born in Bsharri, in what is now Lebanon, and emigrated to the United States as a child, settling in Boston. Writing in both Arabic and English, he became one of the best-selling poets of all time. His prose-poem collection The Prophet (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), presented as the teachings of a wise man departing from a city, has never been out of print and has been translated into more than one hundred languages. His Arabic works, including The Broken Wings (1912) and Spirits Rebellious (1908), shaped modern Arabic literature. He studied art in Paris and was deeply influenced by William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche. He died in New York at forty-eight.