His father and uncle, having established themselves as merchants in a small cellar in lower Manhattan, soon felt the need for an assistant who could read and write in English.

He eventually became familiar with the writings of Shakespeare, Hugo, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Whitman, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Thoreau, Emerson and Byron, to name a few.

Ameen had a natural talent in eloquent speaking, and in 1895, the teenager got carried away by stage fever and joined a touring stock company headed by Henry Jewet (who later had his theatre in Boston).

Once back in his homeland, he began teaching English in a clerical school in return for being taught formal Classical Arabic.

During an ensuing six-year period of solitude, he published, in Arabic, two volumes of essays, a book of allegories and a few short stories and plays.

Additionally, he lectured at the Syrian Protestant College (later The American University of Beirut) and in a few other institutions in Lebanon and the Arab World, as well as in the cities of Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and others.

A reception was held in honor of Rihani for the release of The Book of Khalid and the president of the New York Pleiades Club crowned him with a laurel garland.

In 1916 Ameen married Bertha Case, an American artist, who was part of the Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne and Derain group in Paris, and the Midi, and joined them in exhibiting her work at the Salon de Mai.

Bertha visited Lebanon in 1953 (thirteen years after Ameen's death), staying with the family of Rihani's brother, Albert, in Freike.

Much of this activity focused on countering the rising influence of the American Zionist lobby, which supported a separate Jewish state in Palestine.

Rihani publicly debated leading figures in the American Zionist movement[6] and published numerous articles critical of political Zionism.

Samir Kassir points to Rihani's role in bringing Beirut into intellectual contact with its "cultural environment as well as the wider world".

Thirteen years after his death, in 1953, his brother Albert established the Ameen Rihani Museum in Freike to honor his legacy.

He is the first Arab to write English essays, poetry, novels, short stories, art critiques, and travel chronicles.

Rihani's Arabic book of essays entitled Ar-Rihaniyyaat (1910), endorsed his major philosophic and social beliefs and values that were reflected in his future works.

These beliefs were addressed in the essays of this work such as: Who Am I, Religious Tolerance, From Brooklyn Bridge, The Great City, The Spirit of Our Time, The Spirit of Language, In the Spring of Despair, The Valley of Freike, On Solitude, Ethics, The Value of Life, Conducts of Life, Optimism, The Scattered Truth, Trilateral Wisdom, The Most Exalted Prophet, The State of the Future ...

Rihani's first major novel (in English), The Book of Khalid (1911), was considered a pioneering literary work that paved the way for Arab-American literature.

Khalid, the hero of the novel, descends from Baalbek, from the roots of the Cedars in Lebanon and immigrates all the way to New York where he faces all the contradictions of his Oriental soft background and the harshness of the Occidental severe reality.

He dreams of the virtual Great City, thinks of the ideal Empire, and looks for the Superman who combines within himself the spirituality of the East, the art of Europe, and the Science of America.

So too do Rihani’s writings on the questions of whether democratic principles are evenly projected onto both societies – American and Middle Eastern – where he lived and worked, continue to challenge our most cherished assumptions about ourselves”.