Khalil Gibran – Author Profile

Gibran Khalil Gibran, was born in Bsharri in Lebanon in 1883. Being laden with poverty, he did not receive any formal education or learning. He immigrated with his mother to the USA when he was 12 years old. He lived in Boston for two years. In Boston he met the photographer Fred Holland Day who befriended young Khalil and had a significant artistic and intellectual impact of him.

At the age of 14, Khalil returned to Lebanon attending al-Hikmah high school in Beirut, where he pursued a reformist Arabic curriculum. He also studies religion and ethics.

At the age of 19, Khalil Gibran returned to Boston where he met Mary Haskell, an American school headmistress who supported promising young orphans. Having no formal education, he was placed in an ungraded class reserved for immigrant children, who had to learn English from scratch. It is owing to Mary that he was able to devote himself to his painting.

In 1905, at the age of 22, Gibran publishes a slight collection of essays at the al-Muhajir Press, on "Music." Encouraged by the director of the al-Muhajir newspaper, Gibran begins publishing the prose poems that will later be collected into Arabic books such as "A Tear and a Smile" and "Storms".

In 1906, Gibran published “Spirit Brides” in New York in Arabic and two years later Gibran published a second book of short stories in Arabic, "Spirits Rebellious". At 25 years of age, Gibran began his two-year stay in Paris, paid for by Mary Haskell, where he studied painting and was influenced by the reigning school of Symbolism.

In 1914, the Arabic collection of his newspaper prose poems, "A Tear and a Smile," was published in New York. Also his paintings were exhibited at Montross Gallery on Fifth Avenue; a rare success, since most galleries resisted Gibran's work on grounds of its excessive nudity and modernism.

In 1923 appeared his famous "THE PROPHET ", a book of 26 poetic essays, which has been translated into over 20 languages. The Prophet, who has lived in a foreign city for over 12 years, is about to board a ship that will take him home. He is stopped by a group of people, to whom he teaches the mysteries of life.

Here is an excerpt of "THE PROPHET" about children:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you,

yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

In 1931 Khalil Gibran died, at the age of 48, in a New York hospital owing to cancer and liver failure (due to excessive drinking to avoid pain).