The President Meets the Prophet:Charles W. Eliot's 1910 Encounter with Kahlil Gibran

摘要

IN DECEMBER 1910 KAHLIL GIBRAN-BEST KNOWN TO US TODAY AS THE author of the cult classic The Prophet (1923), reputed to be the all-time bestseller in American publishing history-was a struggling, twenty-seven-year-old artist and poet.' He had immigrated to the United States in 1895 at the age of twelve with his mother, sisters, and brother, leaving his native town of Besharri in Lebanon, then conflated in the American mind with Syria as a province of the Turkish empire.