Kahlil Gibran Biography

Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer, poet, and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected this title in his lifetime. Gibran is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and is one of the best-selling books of all time.

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10 Facts About Kahlil Gibran

1. Name: Kahlil Gibran
2. Age at time of death: 48 years
3. Date of birth: January 6, 1883
4. Date of death: April 10, 1931
5. cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis
6. Nationality: Lebanese-American
7. Marital status: Not available
8. Occupation: writer, poet, and visual artist
9. Famous for: Author of The Prophet
10. Net worth: $1-$5 Million dollars

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Kahlil Gibran Age

Gibran was 48 years old at the time of his death, he was born Gibran Khalil Gibran on January 6, 1883, in Bsharri, Beirut Vilayet, Ottoman Empire. He celebrated his birthday on January 6, every year, and his birth sign is Capricorn.

Kahlil Gibran Death

Gibran died on April 10, 1931 (aged 48) in New York City, United States of America. The causes were cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis due to prolonged serious alcoholism. Gibran expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon. This wish was fulfilled in 1932 when Mary Haskell and his sister Mariana purchased the Mar Sarkis Monastery in Lebanon, which has since become the Gibran Museum. Written next to Gibran’s grave are the words “a word I want to see written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you.

Kahlil Gibran Education

Gibran was a highly educated and qualified person. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at Denison House, a nearby settlement house. Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day, who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. A publisher used some of Gibran’s drawings for book covers in 1898. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at al-Hikma School in Beirut.

Kahlil Gibran Family

Gibran was born in the town of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Lebanon), to Khalil Gibran(father) and Kamila Gibran(mother). As a pre-teen Gibran immigrated with his family to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic.

Gibran’s father initially worked in an apothecary, but with gambling debts, he was unable to pay, he went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. Around 1891, extensive complaints by angry subjects led to the administrator being removed and his staff being investigated.

Gibran’s father was imprisoned for embezzlement, and his family’s property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila Gibran decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Gibran’s father was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Kahlil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and his elder half-brother Peter (in Arabic, Butrus).

The Gibrans settled in Boston’s South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community in the United States. Due to a mistake at school, he was registered as ‘Kahlil Gibran’. His mother began working as a seamstress peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door to door. Gibran started school on September 30, 1895.

Gibran’s mother, along with his elder brother Peter, wanted him to absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to. Thus, at the age of 15, Gibran returned to his homeland to study at a Maronite-run preparatory school and higher-education institute in Beirut, called “al-Hikma” (The Wisdom).

He started a student literary magazine with a classmate and was elected ‘college poet’. He stayed there for several years before returning to Boston in 1902, coming through Ellis Island (a second time) on May 10. Two weeks before he returned to Boston, his sister Sultana died of tuberculosis at fourteen years old. The year after, Peter died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer. His sister Mariana supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker’s shop.

Kahlil Gibran Wife

Gibran met Elizabeth Haskell, a respected headmistress ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship that lasted the rest of Gibran’s life. Haskell spent large sums of money to support Gibran and edited all his English writings.

The nature of their romantic relationship remains obscure; while some biographers assert the two were lovers but never married because Haskell’s family objected, other evidence suggests that their relationship never was physically consummated. Gibran and Haskell were engaged briefly but Gibran called it off. Gibran didn’t intend to marry her while he had affairs with other women.

Haskell later married another man, but then she continued to support Gibran financially and to use her influence to advance his career. She became his editor and introduced him to Charlotte Teller, a journalist, and Emilie Michel (Micheline), a French teacher, who accepted to pose for him as a model and became close friends. In 1908, Gibran went to study art in Paris for two years. While there he met his art study partner and lifelong friend Youssef Howayek.

Kahlil Gibran Children

As of now, there isn’t any documented report on the public records about Gibran having children. Nevertheless, this information is currently under review and will be updated once we get it from a credible source.

Kahlil Gibran Net Worth

Gibran had an estimated net worth of $1 to $5 million dollars as of 2021. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income was his career as a writer, poet, and visual artist. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.

Kahlil Gibran Measurements and Facts

Here are some interesting facts and body measurements you should know about Gibran.

Kahlil Gibran Wikipedia

• Full Names: Gibran Khalil Gibran.
• Popular As: Kahlil Gibran.
• Gender: Male.
• Occupation / Profession: Writer.
• Nationality: Lebanese-American.
• Race / Ethnicity: Pending Update.
• Religion: Pending Update.
• Sexual Orientation: Straight.

Kahlil Gibran Birthday

• Zodiac Sign: Capricorn.
• Date of Birth: January 6, 1883.
• Place of Birth: Bsharri, Beirut Vilayet, Ottoman Empire.
• Date of Death: April 10, 1931 (aged 48).
• Place of Death: New York City.
• Birthday: January 6.

Kahlil Gibran Family and Relationship

• Father (Dad): Khalil Gibran.
• Mother: Kamila Gibran.
• Siblings (Brothers and Sisters): Pending Update.
• Marital Status: Pending Update.
• Wife/Spouse: Not Available.
• Dating / Girlfriend: Single.
• Children: Pending Update.

Kahlil Gibran Net Worth and Salary

• Net Worth: $9 million dollars as of 2021.

Kahlil Gibran Paintings

In 1904, drawings of Gibran were displayed for the first time at Day’s studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly-met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910.

While there, he got involved in secret circles promoting rebellion in the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution; his books were eventually banned by the Ottoman authorities. In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where he would start writing The Prophet in 1915, and where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918.

His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914, and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziade since 1912. In 1920, Gibran founded The Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets.

By the time of his death, the Prophet had already been translated into German and in French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.

” He explored literary forms as diverse as “poetry, parables, fragments of conversation, short stories, fables, political essays, letters, and aphorisms.” Salma Jayyusi has called him “the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of the twentieth century.”

At the same time, “most of Gibran’s paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism”, with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed “more to the findings of Da Vinci than it did to any modern insurgent.” His “prodigious body of work” has been described as “an artistic legacy to people of all nations.”

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet (book)

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran’s best-known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history, and it has never been out of print.

summary of The Prophet (book)

The prophet, Al Mustafa, has lived in the city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship that will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition.

The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

Popularity

The Prophet has been translated into more than 100 languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. By 2012, it had sold more than nine million copies in its American edition alone since its original publication in 1923.

Of an ambitious first printing of 2,000 in 1923, Knopf sold 1,159 copies. The demand for The Prophet doubled the following year—and doubled again the year after that. Since then, annual sales have risen steadily: from 12,000 in 1935 to 111,000 in 1961 to 240,000 in 1965. The book sold its one-millionth copy in 1957. At one point, The Prophet sold more than 5,000 copies a week worldwide.

Inspiration

Though born a Maronite, Gibran was influenced not only by his own religion but also by Islam, and especially by the mysticism of the Sufis. His knowledge of Lebanon’s bloody history, with its destructive factional struggles, strengthened his belief in the fundamental unity of religions, which his parents exemplified by welcoming people of various religions into their home.:p55 Connections and parallels have also been made to William Blake’s work, as well as the theological ideas of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson such as reincarnation and The Over-soul.

The themes of influence in his work were Islamic/Arabic art, European Classicism (particularly Leonardo Da Vinci) and Romanticism (Blake and Auguste Rodin), the pre-Raphelite Brotherhood, and more modern symbolism and surrealism.

Gibran had a number of strong connections to the Bahá’í Faith starting around 1912. One of Gibran’s acquaintances, Juliet Thompson, reported several anecdotes relating to Gibran. She recalled Gibran had met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the leader of the religion, at the time of `Abdu’l-Bahá’s journeys to the West.

Gibran was unable to sleep the night before meeting him in person to draw his portrait in April 1912 on the island of Manhattan.:p253 Gibran later told Thompson that in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá he had “seen the Unseen, and been filled”. Gibran began work on The Prophet in 1912, when “he got the first motif, for his Island God”, whose “Prometheus exile shall be an Island one.”[8]:p165 In 1928, after the death of `Abdu’l-Bahá, at a viewing of a movie of `Abdu’l-Bahá, Gibran rose to talk and proclaimed in tears an exalted station of `Abdu’l-Bahá and left the event weeping still.

Kahlil Gibran Love Quotes

• ♦One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life♦
• ♦If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were♦
• ♦If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work♦
• ♦Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love♦
• ♦I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit♦
• ♦But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls♦
• ♦But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls♦
• ♦Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy♦
• ♦Everyone has experienced that truth: that love, like a running brook, is disregarded, taken for granted; but when the brook freezes over, then people begin to remember how it was when it ran, and they want it to run again♦

Kahlil Gibran Art

Gibran was an accomplished visual artist, especially in drawing and watercolor, having attended the Académie Julian art school in Paris from 1908 until 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style over the then up-and-coming realism. Gibran held the first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston at Day’s studio.

Kahlil Gibran Books

• The Prophet (book) 1923
• Broken Wings (Gibran novel) 1912
• The Madman 1918
• Sand and Foam 1926
• Spirits Rebellious 1908
• Jesus, The Son of Man Kahlil Gibran 1928
• The Garden of the Prophet 1933
• A Tear and a Smile 1914
• The Earth Gods Kahlil Gibran 1931
• Gibran’s Little Book of Love
• Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran 1947
• The Forerunner Kahlil Gibran
• The Wisdom of Kahlil Gibran
• The Collected Works Kahlil Gibran
• Mirrors of the Soul Kahlil Gibran
• Twenty Drawings Kahlil Gibran
• The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart
• Between Night and Morn Kahlil Gibran
• Secrets of the Hearts Kahlil Gibran
• The Wanderer Kahlil Gibran
• Between Night and Morn Kahlil Gibran
• The Eye of the Prophet
• The Voice of the Master Kahlil Gibran
• Spirit Brides Kahlil Gibran
• Love Letters from a Prophet Paulo Coelho
• The Procession Kahlil Gibran
• Lazarus and His Beloved
• Thoughts and Meditations
• Kahlil Gibran, His Life, and World
• Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran
• Greatest Work of Kahlil Gibran
• The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems Kahlil Gibran
• The Kahlil Gibran Collection
• Patterns of Happiness: Thoughts on the Joys of Living Kahlil Gibran
• The Earth Gods
• The Prophet and Other Writings
• The Essential Kahlil Gibran
• The Wisdom of Gibran: Aphorisms and Maxims
• Gibran Love Letters: The Love Letters of Kahil Gibran to May Ziadah
• Prose Poems Kahlil Gibran
• The Complete Works of Khalil Gibran Kahlil Gibran
• Al-Bada’i’ waal-Tara’if Kahlil Gibran
• Prophecies of Love: Reflections from the Heart Kahlil Gibran
• Spirits Rebellious, a Tear and a Smile, the Madman: His Parables and Poems, the Wanderer Kahlil Gibran
• Prophecies of Love: Reflections from the Heart Kahlil Gibran

Frequently Asked Questions About Kahlil Gibran

Who is Gibran?

Gibran was a renowned Lebanese-American writer, poet, and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected this title in his lifetime.

How old was Gibran at the time of death?

Gibran was 48 years old at the time of his death, he was born Gibran Khalil Gibran on January 6, 1883,

Was Gibran married?

Gibran was in a long-time relationship with Elizabeth Haskell but they never married. He met Elizabeth Haskell, a respected headmistress ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship that lasted the rest of Gibran’s life. Haskell spent large sums of money to support Gibran and edited all his English writings.

How much was Gibran worth?

Gibran had an estimated net worth of $1 to $5 million dollars as of 2021. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income was his career as a writer, poet, and visual artist. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.

What was Gibran’s cause of death?

Kahlil died of cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis due to prolonged serious alcoholism.

Is Gibran dead or alive?

Gibran died on April 10, 1931 (aged 48) in New York City, United States of America. The causes were cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis due to prolonged serious alcoholism.

Gibran Social Media Contacts

• Instagram: Pending Update.
• Twitter: Pending Update.
• Facebook: Pending Update.
• Youtube: Pending Update.
• Tiktok: Pending Update.
• Website: Pending Update.

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