In 1896, he returned to Lebanon for high school, where he acquired the rudiments of an Arabic literary education. He returned to America and his intellectual friends in 1902. Soon after his mother, sister, and half-brother died, leaving him alone in America with his surviving sister. During the next few years he began working seriously as an artist and attracted somewhat wider attention, even exhibiting in a small way. He also began to write for the Arabic newspapers published in America. His prose poems, simple parables written without the rhetorical elaborations of traditional Arabic poetry, quickly made him a major figure among Arabic writers in America. In 1908 one of his American friends, Mary Haskell, supplied the funds for him to go to Paris to study art.

Returning to America in 1910, he worked continuously on his drawings and paintings and continued to write for the Arabic newspapers. In 1912 he moved to New York to be closer to the centers of art and Arabic literature in America. His art earned him only a precarious living, and he was forced to depend on the assistance of friends, particularly Mary Haskell, a talented and independent woman who was the headmistress of a girls’ school in Boston. When Gibran began writing seriously in English, she served as his editor; the form of his English writings owes much to her assistance and judgment. His first English work was The Wanderer, a collection of prose poems and parables. By this time he was well established as a major modern Arabic writer. The Prophet, his best known work, was written over a number of years and finally published in 1923. This and the other English works that followed it eventually gave Gibran a degree of financial independence. He continued to work on his paintings, but his health began to deteriorate. He died on April 10, 1931. Despite the objections of the church authorities, who had been offended by his anti-clerical writings, he received a religious funeral. At his instructions, his body was taken back to be buried in his home village of Bisharri and the royalties of his books were divided between his sister, the only surviving member of his immediate family, and his village.

Gibran is first of all an Arabic writer. Arabic was his native language and the language he was always most comfortable with. Even after living in America for most of his life, he would still write a poem first in Arabic and then translate it into English. His Arabic works are remarkable, free of the exaggerated rhetoric and strict traditional forms characteristic of Arabic poetry up to his time. His simple diction and new forms revolutionized Arabic literature. Except for a short novel, Broken Wings, a verse dialogue, Processions, and some one-act plays, all of his Arabic writings were in the form of short pieces— stories, parables, and prose poems—written for newspapers and magazines. Many were later collected and published as books.