Authors

Canadian (British-born) · 1874–1958

Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service was a British-born Canadian poet known as the 'Bard of the Yukon' whose ballads of the Klondike Gold Rush — 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew,' 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' — made him among the most widely recited poets in the English-speaking world. He spent eight years in the Yukon working as a bank teller while writing the verse that made him famous. He later settled in France, lived to eighty-four, and was still being widely recited a century after his Yukon poems appeared.