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The Service in this case is Robert William Service,
a Glasgow-born bank teller, who became the poet of the
Yukon and Scotland's answer to Mark Twain. Service was
a compulsive versifier and had three volumes of verse
to prove it. Service had no great literary aspirations.
He considered himself the Poet Laureate of the ordinary
man, and they repaid him by buying everything he wrote
over a long life and a happy one.
Ballads like The Shooting of Dan McGrew and
The Cremation of Sam Magee were exactly to the
taste of the pre-First World War, Edwardian world, and
after it, his Ballads of a Red Cross Man and
other compilations of verse made him a millionaire with
homes in Paris and Hollywood. A most accessible writer,
his first volume sold out even before it left the printers.
The printers themselves bought out the whole run.
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