Gibran Khalil Gibran [ a ] [ b ] January 6, — April 10, , usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran , [ c ] [ d ] was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist ; he was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title.
Born in Bsharri , a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite Christian family, young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston , where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F.
Holland Day. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in , he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time. In , Gibran's drawings were displayed for the first time at Day's studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in in New York City. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in Ottoman Syria after the Young Turk Revolution ; [ 8 ] some of Gibran's writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism , [ 9 ] would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities.
He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on "both sides of the Atlantic Ocean", [ 13 ] and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French.
His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri in present-day Lebanon , to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him "the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century," [ 14 ] and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon.
