45 Facts About Khalil Gibran

Gibran Khalil Gibran, usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist; he was considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title.

Khalil Gibran is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.

Khalil Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the College de la Sagesse in Beirut.

In 1904, Khalil Gibran's drawings 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.

In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A Knopf in 1918, with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods underway.

Khalil Gibran had been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912.

In 1920, Khalil Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets.

Khalil Gibran's body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri, to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.

Khalil Gibran was born January 6,1883, in the village of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria.

Khalil Gibran was thirty when Gibran was born, and Gibran's father, Khalil, was her third husband.

Khalil Gibran had two younger sisters, Marianna and Sultana, and an older half-brother, Boutros, from one of Kamila's previous marriages.

In 1888, Khalil Gibran entered Bsharri's one-class school, which was run by a priest, and there he learnt the rudiments of Arabic, Syriac, and arithmetic.

Khalil Gibran went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator.

Khalil Gibran was imprisoned for embezzlement, and his family's property was confiscated by the authorities.

Khalil Gibran entered the Josiah Quincy School on September 30,1895.

Khalil Gibran's name was registered using the anglicized spelling 'Kahlil Gibran'.

Khalil Gibran's mother began working as a seamstress peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door-to-door.

Khalil Gibran enrolled in an art school at Denison House, a nearby settlement house.

Kamila and Boutros wanted Khalil Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to.

Khalil Gibran held the first art exhibition of his drawings in January 1904 in Boston at Day's studio.

In 1905, Khalil Gibran's first published written work was A Profile of the Art of Music, in Arabic, by Al-Mohajers printing department in New York City.

In July 1908, with Haskell's financial support, Khalil Gibran went to study art in Paris at the Academie Julian where he joined the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens.

Khalil Gibran would pay her a visit upon her return to Paris in July 1910, but there would be no hint of intimacy left between them.

In June 1910, Khalil Gibran visited London with Howayek and Ameen Rihani, whom Khalil Gibran had met in Paris.

Rihani, who was six years older than Khalil Gibran, would be Khalil Gibran's role model for a while, and a friend until at least May 1912.

Khalil Gibran sailed back to New York City from Boulogne-sur-Mer on the Nieuw Amsterdam on October 22,1910, and was back in Boston by November 11.

Khalil Gibran lectured there for several months "in order to promote radicalism in independence and liberty" from Ottoman Syria.

Khalil Gibran then moved to one of the Tenth Street Studio Building's studios for the summer, before changing to another of its studios in fall.

In 1913, Khalil Gibran started contributing to Al-Funoon, an Arabic-language magazine that had been recently established by Nasib Arida and Abd al-Masih Haddad.

In 1920, Khalil Gibran re-created the Arabic-language New York Pen League with Arida and Haddad, Rihani, Naimy, and other Mahjari writers such as Elia Abu Madi.

At a reading of The Prophet organized by rector William Norman Guthrie in St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, Khalil Gibran met poet Barbara Young, who would occasionally work as his secretary from 1925 until Khalil Gibran's death; Young did this work without remuneration.

In 1924, Khalil Gibran told Haskell that he had been contracted to write ten pieces for Al-Hilal in Cairo.

In 1925, Khalil Gibran participated in the founding of the periodical The New East.

At the beginning of 1929, Khalil Gibran was diagnosed with an enlarged liver.

Khalil Gibran was admitted to St Vincent's Hospital, Manhattan, on April 10,1931, where he died the same day, aged forty-eight, after refusing the last rites.

Khalil Gibran had expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon.

Khalil Gibran was a great admirer of Syrian poet and writer Francis Marrash, whose works Khalil Gibran had studied at the College de la Sagesse.

Khalil Gibran was neglected by scholars and critics for a long time.

Khalil Gibran created more than seven hundred visual artworks, including the Temple of Art portrait series.

Besides Christianity, Islam and Sufism, Khalil Gibran's mysticism was influenced by theosophy and Jungian psychology.

Khalil Gibran was deeply moved by their desire to have him in their midst, but he knew that to go to Lebanon would be a grave mistake.

Nevertheless, Khalil Gibran called for the adoption of Arabic as a national language of Syria, considered from a geographic point of view, not as a political entity.

Khalil Gibran wrote the famous "Pity the Nation" poem during these years, posthumously published in The Garden of the Prophet.

American sculptor Kahlil G Gibran was a cousin of Gibran.

Khalil Gibran was described in parliament as a cousin of Bob Katter Sr.