Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist who lived in the United States. He was born on January 6, 1883, to a Maronite family in a hamlet in the Ottoman-controlled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate. Gibran's sketches were first shown in public in 1904 at Day's studio in Boston. At first, Gibran's father was an apothecary employee, but he was unable to make ends meet due to gambling debts. He started working for the local Ottoman administration. In Boston, at Day's studio, Gibran displayed his sketches for the first time in January 1904. Gibran met Mary Haskell, a city headmistress of a girls' school who is nine years his senior, at this show. They grew close, and Gibran kept that connection throughout the rest of his life. Gibran began a group of pencil portraits that he would later refer to as "The Temple of Art" in December 1909. The majority of Gibran's works released after 1918 were in English, despite the majority of his early writings being in Arabic. Jesus, the Son of Man was released in 1928, and Sand and Foam in 1926. Author Khalil Gibran passed away in 1931 from liver cirrhosis and an early stage of TB in one of his lungs. Gibran refused to be laid to rest, and he passed on the very next day.