Kahlil Gibran

Born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān in Bsharri, in what is now Lebanon, Gibran emigrated to Boston as a boy and built a double career as a painter and a writer, working first in Arabic and later in English. The Prophet, his 1923 collection of twenty-six prose-poetry fables, is the book that made him a household name: it has never gone out of print and has been translated into more than a hundred languages. He died in New York in 1931, aged forty-eight, and is one of the best-selling poets in the language — which is also why his name attracts so much wisdom he never wrote.