The newspaper mogul thinks like an American and writes like a Brit. No wonder he's leaving Canada.

For 30 years, Conrad Black has been Canada's most extraordinary businessman. For U.S. readers who've never heard of him, this is the same as saying: Conrad Black is the world's tallest midget. But Black doesn't deserve the smack. He's a treat for all of North America, not just its upper half.

Black made headlines last week by selling the last fragments of his Canadian newspaper empire, his remaining half-share in the National Post, the excellent paper he founded in 1998. Black also renounced his Canadian citizenship, which means he now belongs to the largest category of famous Canadians: ex-Canadians.

Black has often been cast as a mini-Murdoch—another rapacious, daredevil, conservative, global press baron. But Black possesses little of Murdoch's commercial bravura. He has never risked it all on TV ventures or movie studios. He has been a stolid newspaper publisher, making millions from a menagerie of teeny-tiny regional papers (the Algonquin, Ill., Countryside) and a few big ones. He has attempted only one bold experiment—the National Post—and now he's sold that, too. Black, until recently the third-largest newspaper publisher in the world, has reduced his holdings to little more than the Telegraph, England's most respected Tory paper; the small but influential Jerusalem Post; and the large but impotent Chicago Sun-Times. And Black is worth only a fraction of what Rupert is—less than a billion dollars, not even real money by American plutocrat standards.

Yet Black is the rarest of breeds: A mogul more interesting for himself than his businesses. He is a better writer than most of the journalists he employs and a better thinker than all of them. A more entertaining public figure you could not find. Now that he's abandoned the Big Maple Leaf, he hopes to buy a prestige newspaper in New York or Washington: The United States should be so lucky!

Black certainly had financial reasons to quit the Great White North. The devaluation of the Canadian dollar had slashed the value of his holdings. His beloved National Post has been bleeding profusely since its launch, and Black was sick of taking the losses. But Black's departure is also the culmination of his patriotic disillusionment. He so loved Canada that he wanted to save it. But Canada did not want Black's kind of salvation.

Here is an old joke about the Canadian character: Why don't you need to cover a Canadian lobster pot? Because the other lobsters will drag down anyone that tries to climb out. Black has spent most of his life encouraging his countrymen to climb out with him. He has waged a gleeful, vicious, and ultimately unsuccessful war against (what he perceives as) its enervating, anti-entrepreneurial collectivism.

Black, born in 1944, was a child of the Canadian establishment, the gray and conforming Toronto elite. His father was a rich investor and brewery executive. After shedding his roots—Black got himself booted from prep school for selling exams—and declaring himself an outcast, Black started buying tiny provincial papers in the late '60s. A decade later, using stock inherited from his father, Black grabbed a Canadian conglomerate, then deployed it to snatch up the Telegraph at a bargain price. From the mid-'80s to the late '90s, he expanded a modest Canadian firm into one that controlled hundreds of dailies in the United States, Australia, England, and Israel and published more than 60 percent of Canadian newspaper titles. He bought cheap at a time when others doubted the future of newspapers and netted a fortune from his confidence.

Almost from the cradle, Black's defining quality was that he resisted Canadian orthodoxy. "In Canada, the received wisdom was so stultifying that conforming to it meant mental death. Conrad Black was one of those unusual people who decided early on that he was not going to be afraid and that he was going to live the truth," says David Frum, a Canadian who has written for Black-owned papers.

Black brought a bloody crimson to Canada's beige political and cultural life. He used his newspapers—especially his Canadian ones—as a platform for his conservative views. By U.S. standards he is a moderate Republican; by Canadian standards, a raging wing nut. Black writes with a ruthless honesty and savage humor that is utterly unexpected in a tycoon. Black can be mean, sexist, intolerant of human frailty, and overbearing, but never dull. (Imagine Mencken with a pile of gold or Hitchens turned upside down.) He denounced Canada's social welfare system as "an overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people." He attacked trade unions, blamed Canada's high taxes for brain drain, pilloried liberal politicians. One typical character assassination: He called an Ontario pol the "Salvador Allende of Canada," trying to "strangle, disembowel, and immolate the vestiges of the incentive-based economy." When the Catholic bishop of Calgary backed a strike at Black's Calgary Herald, Black denounced him as a "jumped-up little twerp" and a "prime candidate for exorcism."

The Canadian Black is more English than the English and more American than the Americans. He is resolutely Anglophilic and monarchist, which did not go over well in democratic Canada. When Black was offered an English peerage, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who loathes Black, invoked an obscure Canadian law forbidding Canadians from accepting English titles. (This is a key reason Black has dropped his Canadian passport.) Meanwhile, Black can't stop telling Canadians that they need to be more like Americans—freer, braver, more entrepreneurial. He has even suggested that Canada join the United States, an idea that's approximately as popular as a national ban on hockey would be.