The greatest story never told, this formidable and gorgeously written biography documents the amazing and controversial short life of Calixa Lavallee - the composer of 'O Canada' - and the tumult of 19th-century North America. To understand 'O Canada,' and to understand the man who wrote it, is to return to the Canada of the mid-nineteenth century, a Canada just forming as a nation, bringing together ancient racial hatreds and novel political possibilities, as culture faced culture, religion faced religion, economy faced economy.