Life and Nature - Scf - State College of Florida

Robert W. Service
Robert William Service was born in Preston, England on January 16, 1874.
Though he was born in England and lived in Europe until he was 20, Service lived in
Canada for many years and is widely known as “the Canadian Kipling” (qtd, in “Robert
W. Service). Wars were a big part of Service‟s life, specifically the Balkan War of 1912-
1913, WWI, and WWII. He went from being educated in Scotland to working at multiple
bank branches in Vancouver and the Yukon Territory to being “a war correspondent for
a Toronto newspaper during the Balkan War” (“Robert W. Service”). After that he
spent some time in France during WWI “as an ambulance driver” (“Robert W. Service”).
The years he spent in Canada and France were his most successful years when it came
to writing. While in Yukon, “his first volume of verse, Songs of a Sourdough (1907), was
published…and was an instant success” (“Robert W. Service”). The money he earned
from his first volume gave him the opportunity “to publish more verse and his first novel,
The Trail of Ninety-Eight: A Northland Romance (1910)” (“Robert W. Service”).
Two of his “widely memorized parlor ballads…„The Shooting of Dan McGrew‟ and „The
Cremation of Sam McGee‟” were poems written to describe the people from Yukon in a
comedic and ironic way (“Robert W(illiam) Service”). His popularity grew from France as
well after he published “one of his best-known books of verse, Rhymes of a Red Cross
Man (1916), [and] it was this volume that enabled Service to gain a degree of distinction
as a poet in his own right” (“Robert W. Service”). One of his other works from his time in
France, The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter (1914), was “based on his
experiences in the bohemian circles of Europe before World War I” (“Robert W.
Service”).