by Kahlil Gibran

Gibran Kahlil Gibran was born January 6, 1883, in Bsharri, Lebanon. Part of a wave of several hundred thousand emigrants from Syria and Lebanon, his mother moved with her four children to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1895. Gibran met his first mentor here, the photographer Fred Holland Day, who recognized the budding artist in the young man. Three years after his arrival, Gibran returned to Lebanon to attend the secondary school Madrasat al-Hikmah in Beirut. He read voraciously here, consuming the Arabic literary classics during his four-year stay in Lebanon and developing an intimate connection with his homeland and its problems. Gibran returned to Boston to spend the next halfdozen years in artistic pursuits, including the writing of stories and short “prose poems” in a biblical style. In 1904 the aspiring young writer had a fateful meeting with Amin al-Ghurayyib, editor of al-Muhajir (The Immigrant), the...