Although these stories are vital and accessible to Western readers, they retain some features that betray their Near Eastern origins. “The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame” and “Marta al-Baniyah” depend for their dramatic effect upon a two-part symmetry, with an initial scene that contrasts dramatically to the second scene. This aesthetic of symmetry, with roots in Arabic literature, differs from the Western conception of a story as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end wherein the action is driven by the actions of the protagonist and their effects. It seems likely, as well, that Gibran’s devotion to drawing and painting inspired him with a keen appreciation for the value of contrast, and led him to give us a series of diptychs, of paired, contrasting tableaux, each depicted in loving detail. “Yuhanna the Madman,” on the other hand, comes much closer to the general Western story-telling model, with its series of conflicts between the protagonist and the monks, each driven by Yuhanna’s own actions and psychological bent.

Despite his Lebanese origins and the influence on him of Arabic literature, from A Thousand and One Nights to the Koran and the Arabic Bible, Gibran is a quintessentially American writer, a celebrator of the individual, of progress, of initiative. Like Whitman, Gibran combines his faith in progress with a love of nature, and his belief in the individual with a mystical pantheism. Yet Gibran is a hyphenated American, and those now seeking evidence of creativity and achievement in U.S. writing by groups outside the WASP elite might reconsider him. The work he produced in the first half of his creative life is an American literature in Arabic; what could be more multicultural?

His works have all the hallmarks of an immigrant literature—the feelings of alienation, of falling between two stools, of new possibilities and rebellion against old rigidities. His is a Horatio Alger story of ascent from the Boston slums near Chinatown to the chic galleries of New York’s intelligentsia in the roaring Twenties. Such an ascent exacts a price. Gibran’s troubles with the Maronite Catholic Church resulting from his modern, American anticlericalism (seen here in “Yuhanna the Madman”) are as old an immigrant story as the Pilgrims’ problems with the Established English Church and as young a one as Salman Rushdie’s difficulties with the ayatollahs. The immigrant finds it suddenly possible to experiment, not only with cultural forms, but also with values. Like Yeats, Gibran sought a pagan spirituality, engaged in meditative exercises, and believed in a vivid spirit world and in reincarnation. Gibran’s rejection of organized religion and conventional morality while retaining an interest in spiritual growth is, again, very American.

Because of works such as these stories, Gibran occupies a far different place in Arabic literature than he does in American letters. The short story, as opposed to the traditional tale, was not an indigenous literary form in the Middle East, and writers there began experimenting with it only in the late nineteenth century, usually modelling themselves on European writers such as Maupassant. Spirit Brides is among the first widely read books of short stories in the Middle East, so that Gibran must be seen to some extent as a sort of Arabic-language Edgar Allen Poe. The Arabic-speaking writers living in the American diaspora (al-mahjar) had a profound effect on literature back in the Middle East, similar that of the Paris-based writers of the Lost Generation on the U.S. in the 1920s. In Arabic literature courses taught to the approximately 180 million native Arabic speakers world-wide, Gibran’s works form part of the established literary canon, despite the occasional colloquialisms and grammatical idiosyncrasies in his writing that are the mark of his American experience and of his relatively limited formal education in Beirut.