The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran
Summary
A prophet named Almustafa has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, waiting on the hill outside its walls for the ship that will carry him home. When it finally appears, the seeress Almitra asks him to speak to the people before he goes, and the book that follows is his answer: twenty six short addresses on love, marriage, children, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self knowledge, friendship, time, good and evil, prayer, beauty, religion, and death. Gibran gives Almustafa no plot to move through and no argument to win; each address stands alone, offered as counsel rather than doctrine, and the book closes with his ship pulling away from the harbor while the people watch him go.
Gibran wrote in English rather than his native Arabic, in a cadence he drew from scripture and from the psalms and prophetic books he had grown up reading, short declarative lines built for reading aloud rather than argued through. The book reads quickly, a page or two at a sitting, and that same quality, its counsel phrased broadly enough to fit almost any reader's situation, is also the substance of the complaints against it: critics have called its wisdom too general to earn the word wisdom, comforting rather than demanding. Readers who come to it for comfort rather than complexity tend to find exactly what they came for.
Gibran illustrated the book himself and designed its cover, and he had been developing the material since 1912, after an encounter with the Baha'i leader Abdu'l-Baha that he later described as having shown him the unseen. The finished book runs barely over a hundred pages, short enough to read start to finish in an evening, and long enough in print that few of its readers have ever known a year without it.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize considered The Prophet on its 1923 publication by Alfred A. Knopf, and none is recorded as having weighed it since; this was a work published quietly by a Lebanese American writer outside the literary establishment that gave out prizes in the 1920s, not a book passed over by a jury that saw it and said no. Knopf printed two thousand copies at first, and only 1,159 sold in the first year, an unremarkable start for a book that would go on to outsell almost everything published alongside it.
Demand then doubled the following year, and doubled again the year after that, without a prize, a film, or a single celebrated review driving it. Annual sales reached 12,000 by 1935 and passed 100,000 by the early 1960s; the book sold its millionth copy in 1957, and by 2012 more than nine million copies of the American edition alone had gone out, translated into over a hundred languages. It has never gone out of print, and its afterlife includes a 1974 musical setting featuring Richard Harris and a 2014 animated film produced by Salma Hayek.