CMES Colloquium: The Birth of “The Prophet”: The Creation of Gibran’s Masterpiece in His Own Words

Dalton Einhorn is a graduate of Yale’s School of Management and has spent the past 24 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 speaks to us as we embark on the next 100 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. She died young, and Dalton spent seven years getting permissions from estate holders to continue her 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. It will also provide insight into one of the most important books of the past 100 years, conceived first in the mind of a 16 year old student in Beirut, Lebanon.