The Birth of “The Prophet”: The Creation of Gibran’s Masterpiece in His Own Words
Speaker/Performer: Dalton Einhorn, Yale School of Management ‘97
Dalton Einhorn is a graduate of Yale’s School of Management and has spent the past twenty-four years as an enthusiastic student mentor. He has an unusual connection to this lecture, which will be the first-ever unveiling of the origin story of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” told by the author himself from an archive of never-published materials that was found at the University of North Carolina. More than a century after the book’s creation, Gibran tells the speaks to us as we embark on the next one hundred years of the life of the best-selling book of the Twentieth Century! Dalton’s mother, Virginia Hilu, was the first and only person ever to be authorized to produce a book from the UNC archive. After she produced that book, she worked on Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” and her notes and his original draft chapters can be found at Stirling Library. Virginia died young, and Dalton spent seven years getting permissions from estate holders to continue his work. What he found was the untouched origin story of “The Prophet.” This talk will share the loving story of its creation and has a number of charming wrinkles. And it will also be an important insight into one of the most important books of the past one hundred years, conceived first in the mind of a sixteen year old student in Beirut, Lebanon.
See poster.