Robert William Service was a popular verse writer known for his ballads. His poetry was well loved for its thrilling rhythms and its dramatic intensity. Many people who did not think they liked poetry found they could relate to the poems of Robert Service.

Service was born in England in 1874. At the age of 15 he followed his father, a Scottish bank clerk, into the banking business, but in 1896 he moved to Canada and eventually got a job working for the Canadian Bank of Commerce. With the bank, he was stationed in the Yukon, a territory of northwestern Canada east of Alaska. He was also a newspaper correspondent for the Toronto Star and an ambulance driver during World War I. After the war, he settled in France where he met and married a French woman. Together they lived in Vancouver and Hollywood before returning to France to live with their daughter.

Though he never returned to the Yukon after he left in 1912, it remained a part of Service's life until his death in 1958. It was during his time in the Yukon Territory that he wrote some of his best-known poetry. He loved the region, saying of it, "The only society I like is that which is rough and tough—and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people." His first ballad, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," which was later made into a movie, was inspired when Service was accidentally shot at. Service was coming in to his office on a Saturday night looking for a quiet place to write when he startled a bank guard, who fired at him. Fortunately, the guard missed.

Over the next few months, Service wrote so many poems that he put together a book, called Songs of a Sourdough, from which "The Cremation of Sam McGee" is taken. This book, first published in 1907, enjoyed success and made Service famous. Later, it was published with the title The Spell of the Yukon. In 1908, Service composed and published Ballads of a Cheechako and, the following year, resigned from the bank in order to write full time.

Service wrote two autobiographical works, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948) and six novels, including The Trail of '98 (1912) about the Klondike Gold Rush, and more than 45 poetry collections containing over 1,000 poems. He died in 1958.