The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Hardcover: 128 pages

Publisher: Knopf; 64th printing with new jacket edition (February 21, 1995)

The Prophet is twenty-six poetic essays by the Lebanese-American artist, philosopher and writer Khalil Gibran. In the book, the prophet Almustafa who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years is about to board a ship which will carry him home. As he departs the townspeople gather to wish him well. A local seeress who knows him best asks him to share his wisdom so that it will endure for generations to come. 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.

Khalil Gibran was born January 6, 1883 in Bsharri, Lebanon; died April 10, 1931 in New York City, United States. He was a Lebanese American artist, poet, writer, philosopher and theologian. He was born in Lebanon when it was the Mount Lebanon Province of the Ottoman Empire. He spent most of his life in the United States. He is the third bestselling poet in history after William Shakespeare and Lao Tse. Source: wikipedia