The Prophet was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1923, illustrated with Gibran’s own drawings. Initial sales were modest — a few thousand copies in the first year — but the book found its audience gradually, through word of mouth and personal recommendation, and has never stopped selling. It has been translated into over 100 languages, has sold over 100 million copies, and is the third-best-selling poetry book in history (after the works of Shakespeare and Lao Tzu).
The form is deceptively simple: Almustafa, a prophet who has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, is about to board a ship that will take him home. Before departure, the people of the city ask him to speak on the subjects that matter most to them — love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
Each response is a prose poem of one to three pages — rhythmic, aphoristic, drawing on the imagery of nature and the body. The language is simultaneously biblical and modern, Eastern and Western — Gibran, a Lebanese Maronite Christian educated in both Arabic and English literary traditions, created a voice that belongs to no single culture and therefore speaks to all of them.
The book’s extraordinary commercial longevity is a literary phenomenon: it sells to each generation of young people discovering spiritual literature, to wedding planners seeking non-denominational readings, and to the bereaved seeking consolation.
Collecting The Prophet
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1923): Cloth binding with Gibran’s illustrations.
Market values:
- First edition, first printing (Knopf, 1923): $500–$2,500
- Signed by Gibran (rare): $3,000–$10,000+
- Good condition first edition: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $100–$300
- Early printings (1920s–1930s): $50–$200