Khalil Gibran

Gibran left the mountains of Ottoman Lebanon for Boston in 1895, where a teacher spotted his talent and connected him to publisher F. Holland Day. Sent back at fifteen to study in Beirut, he returned to the U.S. in 1902 after his sister's death, then lost his mother and half-brother the next year. He showed drawings in 1904, published his first Arabic book in 1905, and with backing from benefactress Mary Haskell studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910, mixing with Syrian rebels whose anti-Ottoman ideas he echoed in writings later banned. Settling in New York in 1911, he published The Madman in English in 1918 and The Prophet in 1923, co-founded the Pen League in 1920, and exhibited paintings that critics saw as classicist and mythological. He died in 1931 of cirrhosis and tuberculosis, already a literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and left his royalties to his birth village, where a museum now stands.