Kahlil Gibran

Khalil Gibran was born into an impoverished family in present-day Lebanon. He received no formal education in Lebanon, but learned about the Bible and the Syriac and Arabic languages. Gibran’s family immigrated to the U.S. in 1895, settling in Boston. In American schools, Gibran excelled in art and poetry, and he attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910. Gibran became an accomplished visual artist, painting portraits of famous friends like WB Yeats and Carl Jung; however, he is chiefly known as a writer, especially of The Prophet (1923), a book of 26 prose poetry essays that has been translated into more than 40 languages. Gibran died at age 48 of tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver.