Robert Service is known to millions of people as the poet of the Yukon Gold Rush, the author of such widely memorized parlor ballads as"The Shooting of Dan McGrew"and "The Cremation of Sam McGee." These and other verses from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough (1907; called The Spell of the Yukon in its U.S. edition), made him famous from the time of their publication until long after his death. Many readers came to believe that Service was as much of a loner and drifter as the Yukon characters he so often wrote about, but that image is far from the truth. In fact he was a bank clerk, a man who was acutely aware of the market for which he was writing (he refused the word "poetry" for his titles, insisting on calling his work "rhymes," "songs," or "ballads"), and in his final years...