Poet, artist and mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 to a poor Christian family in Lebanon and emigrated to the United States as an adolescent. His masterpiece, The Prophet, a book of poetic essays written in his youth, has sold millions of copies in more than twenty languages since its first publication in 1923. But all Gibran’s works – essays, stories, parables, prose poems – are imbued with equally powerful simplicity and wisdom, whether meditating upon love, marriage, friendship, work, pleasure, time or grief. Perhaps no other twentieth-century writer has touched the hearts and minds of so remarkably varied and widespread a readership. Included in this volume are The Madman, The Forerunner, The Prophet, Sand and Foam, Jesus the Son of Man, Earth Gods, The Wanderer, The Garden of the Prophet, Prose Poems, Spirits Rebellious, Nymphs of the Valley and A Tear and a Smile – all the major works, together with more than eighty of Gibran’s own illustrations.
