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Literary Collections Canadian

Robert W. Service

Selected Poetry and Prose

by (author) Robert Service

edited by Michael Gnarowski

Publisher
Dundurn
Initial publish date
Apr 2012
Category
Canadian, General, Canadian
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781554889396
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $26.99

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Description

The writing of Robert W. Service is mostly known through his poems and ballads. Immortalized by his two iconic ballads, The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew, he has entered the world’s imagination as the Bard of the Yukon. But Service was much more than a chronicler of the Great North.

A traveller and adventurer who tried his hand at many occupations — bank clerk, orange picker, journalist, stretcher bearer, et cetera — upon which he drew both for his ballads and in his fiction, Service left a fascinating set of impressions of that rare accomplishment: the successful literary life in the course of which he produced everything from poems and ballads to fictional romance to thrillers and how to stave off the dreary process of aging.

Robert W. Service is a fresh selection of the most interesting and significant works of the author with a biographical introduction, notes on the various selections, and a bibliography of additional readings.

About the authors

Robert Service was born in Lancashire, England in 1874, the son of lower middle class parents, the eldest of what would be ten children. When he was four, the family moved to Glasgow, Scotland and he and a brother were taken to live with his paternal grandparents and four aunts nearby in Kilwinning. In school, he was known for getting into scrapes, but mostly was a solitary and imaginative child, immersing himself in books. At a celebratory meal for his sixth birthday, he always remembered surprising the adults and even himself, with two spontaneous rhyming verses in the form of a grace, foretelling of his future and his talents.

Robert Service's profile page

Michael Gnarowski co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, compiled The Concise Bibliography of E nglish Canadian Literature, and edited the Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series for McGraw-Hill Ryerson. He has written for Encyclopedia Americana, The Canadian Encyclopedia, The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Gnarowski is professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Michael Gnarowski's profile page

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