Written Works

At his death Gibran was working on The Garden of the Prophet (1933), which was to be the second volume in a trilogy begun by The Prophet. It is the story of Almustafa’s return to his native island and deals with humanity’s relationship with nature. Of the third volume, “The Death of the Prophet,” only one sentence was written: “And he shall return to the City of Orphalese . . . and they shall stone him in the market-place, even unto death; and he shall call every stone a blessed name.” Barbara Young explained that she had destroyed the manuscript for The Wanderer that Mary Haskell had edited; as for The Garden of the Prophet, she later wrote that the urge to complete the book came to her “in the deep of night” and that “his glowing words came into being as if he were indeed supplying the need.”