Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet

• The Prophet Is Published (Sept. 23, 1923)

  

  Royal Photographic Society / Getty ImagesKahlil Gibran in 1897

  By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

  In the aftermath of World War I, the Lebanese-born, Boston-based poet-philosopher Kahlil Gibran wrote what would become one of the world’s most translated works of philosophy: The Prophet. This collection of inspirational sermons delivered by a fictional prophet—on love, marriage, work, reason, self-knowledge and ethics—challenged tired orthodoxies and oppressive ideologies. Though Gibran’s exaltation of human individuality, creativity and difference was not entirely original, the book’s success lay in his ability to make his insights feel like revelations. Ever since its publication in 1923, The Prophet has been a salve for readers who tried—in good American fashion—to break from conformity. Gibran readers include Woodrow Wilson and American soldiers during World War II (thanks to its selection for the American Services Editions in 1943); Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash; members of the 1960s counterculture and now Salma Hayek.The Prophet taught self-trust amid the buzzing, blooming confusion of modern America. Sometimes it takes a foreigner to speak the voice of Americans’ inner conscience.

  Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History and the founder of the Intellectual History Group at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, won the John H. Dunning Prize, an award for an outstanding monograph in a subject in U.S. history, from the American Historical Association.

  Read more about the ongoing influence of The Prophet, here in the TIME Vault