The Prophet was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1923 and has never gone out of print. It has been translated into more than 110 languages and sold tens of millions of copies across a century — a run of sustained readership that no conventional literary or religious text enjoys without institutional support. Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet and painter who had already published in Arabic and English, wrote the book in English over a period of years as an act of concentrated spiritual summation. He considered it the most important thing he would ever produce, and he was not wrong.
Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, in what is now Lebanon, and came to the United States as a child. He was shaped by three traditions simultaneously: the Maronite Christian mysticism of his family’s culture, the Sufi Islamic philosophy of the Arabic literary world he inhabited, and the Western Romantic and Transcendentalist tradition — Blake, Whitman, Nietzsche — he encountered in Boston and New York. The Prophet is the product of all three, which is part of why it belongs fully to none and speaks across all of them. It has been read as Christian devotional literature, as Sufi wisdom poetry, as humanist philosophy, and as secular meditation on what it means to be human. All of these readings are supportable. None of them is complete.
