Al-Ajnihah al-Mutakassirah [Broken Wings], New York: Mir'at al-Gharb, 1912 [owned by Mary Elizabeth Haskell; inscribed by the Author]. In 1912 Gibran published al-Ajniha al-mutakassira, which he seems to have written several years earlier. The novella is his only attempt at a sustained narrative. When he was eighteen, the narrator fell in love in Beirut with Salma Karama. Forced by her father to marry an archbishop’s nephew, Salma was able to meet her lover occasionally until they were discovered together. Salma was then confined to her home and eventually died in childbirth. Reviews in the Arabic press were strongly positive, though there were some reservations about the character of Salma and Gibran’s views on the position of Arab women. The book led to a correspondence with the Syrian writer May Ziyada that evolved into an epistolary love affair.

al-Nabī [The Prophet], Translated into Arabic by Antūniyūs Bashīr, al-Qāirah: al-Maṭbaʻah al-Raḥmānīyah bi-Miṣr, 1926.

A collection of three short stories, it was first published in 1906 by New York newspaper Al-Mohajer. It is known in English as 'Nymphs of the Valley' or 'Brides of the Meadows'. “Rimal al-ajyal wa al-nar al-khalidah” (The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame) is a story of reincarnation. Nathan, the son of the priest of Astarte in Baalbek, loses his lover to disease. Despite her promise that they will meet again, he is maddened by grief and wanders lost in the desert. Ages pass, and a Bedouin shepherd, ‘Ali al-Husayni, falls asleep in the ruins of the temple and dreams of love. Seeing a girl by a stream, he recognizes himself as Nathan and her as his long-lost lover. It is noteworthy that the main part of the story is set in the Phoenician, not the Islamic, Lebanese past. The other two stories deal with social oppression. In “Marta al-baniya” an orphan is kidnaped from her village by a man from the city, who rapes her and keeps her as his mistress. She becomes pregnant, and he throws her out. When she dies, the priests refuse to bury her in consecrated ground. In “Yuhanna al-majnum” (Yuhanna the Madman) a poor cowherd’s cattle stray onto monastery land while he is reading his Bible, and the monks refuse to return them. When Yuhanna preaches against the monks at the Easter service, they arrest him; he is freed only after his father testifies that he is a madman.

In 1928 Gibran published his longest book, Jesus, the Son of Man: His Words and His Deeds as Told and Recorded by Those Who Knew Him.Jesus had appeared in Gibran’s writings and art in various forms; he told Mary Haskell that he had recurring dreams of Jesus and mentioned wanting to write a life of Jesus in a 1909 letter to her. The book was written in a little over a year in 1926-1927. Haskell edited the manuscript. Seventy-eight people who knew Jesus—some real, some imaginary; some sympathetic, others hostile—tell of him from their own points of view. Anna is puzzled by the worship of the Magi. An orator is impressed by Jesus’ rhetoric. A merchant sees the parable of the talents as the essence of commerce and cannot understand why Jesus’ followers insist that he is a god. Pontius Pilate discusses the political factors leading to his decision to execute Jesus. Barabbas is tormented by the knowledge that he is alive only because Jesus died in his place. It was the most lavishly produced of Gibran’s books, with some of the illustrations in color. For once, the reviews were strongly and uniformly favorable, and the book has remained the most popular of his works next to The Prophet.

Gibran’s final work to be published in his lifetime was The Earth Gods (1931). He had mentioned it to Haskell in 1915 as the prologue to a play in English; it seems to have been largely completed the following year and thus belongs to the period just before al-Mawakib. It is a debate among three gods: the first speaks for pessimism; the second defends the potential for transcendence of the human world, and the third reconcile the positions of the other two.

In 1919 Knopf published a collection of Gibran’s art works as Twenty Drawings, with Alice Raphael’s essay as an introduction. The pictures are not his best work; the book did not draw much attention, and the one review was ambivalent. It is Gibran’s only book published in the West that has gone out of print.

Kitab Dam'ah wa Ibtisama [A Book of Tears and Mirth], New York: Atlantic Press, 1914 [owned by Mary Elizabeth Haskell; inscribed by the Author].

In 1914 Nasib 'Aridah, the editor of al-Funun, published this collection of fifty-six of Gibran’s early newspaper columns (known in English as 'A Tear and a Smile' or 'Tears and Laughter'); most are a page or two long, and the volume as a whole comprises about a hundred pages. For the most part they are prose poems: painterly expositions of a vivid image or story fragments. The themes are love, spirituality, beauty, nature, and alienation and homecoming. Typical are “Hayat al-hubb” (The Life of Love), portraying the seasons of love of a man and a woman from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, and “Amama ‘arsh al-jamal” (Before the Throne of Beauty), in which the goddess of nature tells the poet how she was worshiped by his ancestors and counsels him to commune with nature in wild places. Gibran feigned reluctance to republish these pieces on the grounds that he had moved beyond them. They are not especially deep, but they have a freshness and the moral and aesthetic earnestness that was always Gibran’s strength in his writing and his art. The collection was dedicated to Haskell using her initials, “M.E.H.”

Nubdhah fī Fann al-Mūsīqá [The Music], New York: Maṭbaʻat Jarīdat al-Muhājir, 1905 [Pocket Edition].

In 1926 Gibran published Sand and Foam. It comprises about three hundred aphorisms of two to a dozen lines, generally written in the style of The Prophet. Sand and Foam is decorated with Gibran’s drawings, and the aphorisms are separated by floral dingbats also drawn by Gibran. Some scholars consider this book the off cuts of The Prophet, written on various materials from match box cartons and napkins whenever inspiration would take hold.

Gibran’s first book in English, 'The Madman: His Parables and Poems,' was completed in 1917; it was brought out in 1918 by the young literary publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who went on to publish all of Gibran’s English works. An introduction, in which the narrator tells how he became a madman when a thief stole his masks and he ran maskless through the streets, is followed by a series of pieces that were written, and sometimes published, separately. Most were composed in Arabic and translated into English by Gibran with Haskell’s editorial assistance. New here are a sardonic or bitter tone and a move from prose poem to parable as Gibran’s major mode of expression. The pieces include “The Two Cages,” in which a caged sparrow greets a caged lion each morning as “brother,” and “The Three Ants,” in which the insects meet on the nose of a sleeping man. The first two remark on the barren nature of this strange land; the third insists that they are on the nose of the Supreme Ant. The other ants laugh at his strange preaching; at that moment the man awakes, scratches his nose, and crushes the ants. Reviews were mixed but mostly positive. Mayy Ziyada, however, told Gibran that the “cruelty” and “dark caverns” in the work made her nervous. Several of the poems were anthologized in poetry collections.

Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, was published in September 1923. The earliest references to a mysterious prophet counseling his people before returning to his island home can be found in Haskell’s journal from 1912. Gibran worked on it from time to time and had finished much of it by 1919. He seems to have written it in Arabic and then translated it into English. As with most of his English books, Haskell acted as his editor, correcting Gibran’s chronically defective spelling and punctuation but also suggesting improvements in the wording. The work begins with the prophet Almustafa preparing to leave the city of Orphalese, where he has lived for twelve years, to return to the island of his birth. The people of the city gather and beg him not to leave, but the seeress Almitra, knowing that his ship has come for him, asks him instead to tell them his truths. The people ask him about the great themes of human life: love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, and many others, concluding with death. Almustafa speaks of each of the themes in sober, sonorous aphorisms grouped into twenty-six short chapters. As in earlier books, Gibran illustrated The Prophet with his own drawings, adding to the power of the work. The Prophet received tepid reviews in Poetry and The Bookman, an enthusiastic review in the Chicago Evening Post, and little else. On the other hand, the public reception was intense. It began with a trickle of grateful letters; the first edition sold out in two months; 13,000 copies a year were sold during the Great Depression, 60,000 in 1944, and 1,000,000 by 1957. Many millions of copies were sold in the following decades, making Gibran the best-selling American poet of the twentieth century. It is clear that the book deeply moved many people. When critics finally noticed it, they were baffled by the public response; they dismissed the work as sentimental, overwritten, artificial, and affected. Neither The Prophet nor Gibran’s work, in general, are mentioned in standard accounts of twentieth-century American literature, though Gibran is universally considered a major figure in Arabic literature. Part of the critical puzzlement stems from a failure to appreciate an Arabic aesthetic: The Prophet is a Middle Eastern work that stands closer to eastern didactic classics such as the Book of Job and the works of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Persian poets Rumi and Sa’di than to anything in the modern American canon. Gibran knew that he would never surpass The Prophet, and for the most part, his later works do not come close to measuring up to it. The book made him a celebrity, and his monastic lifestyle added to his mystique.