Kahlil Gibran
1883–1931
Biography
Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a village in the Mount Lebanon region of the Ottoman Empire, into a Maronite Christian family. When he was about twelve his mother took the children to Boston, where a teacher noticed his talent for drawing and introduced him to the photographer F. Holland Day. At fifteen he went back to Beirut for schooling, and from 1908 to 1910 he studied art in Paris, with financial help from a benefactress, Mary Haskell. He settled in New York in 1911 and lived there until his death in 1931, although his body was later taken back to his village.
Gibran wrote in Arabic and English and also made paintings and drawings, so he is described as a writer, poet and artist at once. In New York he belonged to the Pen League, a group of émigré writers from the Arab world, and in 1920 he helped revive it. His English book The Prophet appeared in the United States in 1923. It is a sequence of short poetic essays on love, work, death and other human matters, and it became one of the best-selling books ever published, with translations into more than a hundred languages. In the Arab world he is remembered as a major influence on modern Arabic poetry and prose.
The three Arabic books on this site are earlier and less known to English readers. The Broken Wings is a novel about a young woman in Lebanon caught between her family, the church and feudal power. The Rebellious Spirits is an early collection of stories written in the same spirit of protest against oppression. A Tear and a Smile is a book of short prose poems on love and sorrow. Together they show the Arabic-language writer behind the author best known for The Prophet.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
الأجنحة المتكسرة
by جبران خليل جبران
Kahlil Gibran's first novel in Arabic, written in New York and published in 1912, is a short, lyrical story of love and sorrow in Beirut. A young man falls in love with Salma Karamy, the daughter of an old friend of his father's, in a city where wealth and the Church decide whom…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.الأرواح المتمردة
by جبران خليل جبران
Four stories confront the authority of clergy, custom, and wealth in Lebanese society. Gibran gives the rebels a lyrical voice and links their personal struggles to a demand for freedom. This book contains scenes of violence as its author wrote them.
Summary written by gpt-6-sol.دمعة وابتسامة
by جبران خليل جبران
Kahlil Gibran's 1914 collection of short prose pieces in Arabic, written in New York for the Arabic press of the emigrants. Prose poems, parables and small scenes of love, death, poverty, nature and the poet's place in the world, in the soft, musical style that his later English…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.