PASSINGS

Mikhail Naimy; Lebanese Writer, Biographer

Mikhail Naimy, 98, one of Lebanon’s major literary figures and a biographer and longtime associate of Lebanese philosopher Khalil Gibran. Naimy, who lived in the United States for 21 years and served in the U.S. Army during World War I, was educated at a Russian missionary school in Jerusalem and attended high school in Moscow. He moved to the United States in 1911 and earned a law degree from Washington State University. He was drafted in 1918, and sent to the front in France. Naimy’s career as a writer began after his return to Washington in 1919. He returned to Lebanon in 1932, a few months after Gibran’s death. Naimy and Gibran became close friends in the United States, where Gibran spent most of his adult life. Naimy’s “Book of Mirdad, a Lighthouse and a Haven” has been translated into several languages. His biography of Gibran was first published in Arabic in 1934 and then reprinted in English in New York in 1950. In Beirut on Sunday.