The Prophet

The Prophet is a book of prose poetry published in 1923 by the renowned Lebanese philosopher and writer Kahlil Gibran who has been a member of a group of Lebanese intellectuals and writers expatriated in the United States. Having been translated from English into most languages of the world and sold by millions of copies, The Prophet is about goodness, humanism and universal spirituality. It displays the influence of great world religious traditions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. The protagonist is the eponymous prophet Almustafa (an Arabic word meaning "the chosen one") who is pictured in the very first pages of the book as a man of wisdom and experience who is about to leave the city in which he seems to have spent quite a long time. On his way to the ship that is supposed to take him to his homeland, he meets a group of denizens who start to ask him questions about different issues related to life and existence. Thus, the rest of the book is divided into a number of short poetic essays, each focusing on one aspect of life such as love, marriage, work, food, friendship, religion and death.