by Alex Storey

Created on: December 30, 2010   Last Updated: January 06, 2011

Alan Alexander Milne was a playwright before Pooh overshadowed everything he had already done and he adapted The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham to the stage as Toad of Toad Hall. 

A mathematician at Cambridge and taught by HG Wells at high school, AA Milne worked on the student magazine Granta, became assistant editor of Punch magazine and was a screenwriter for the British film industry. 

Milne served in both the world wars and wrote comical plays to lift the morale of the troops. Marrying Dorothy who he met working for Punch in 1913, they had one son called Christopher Robin Milne.  In 1923, the first children’s poem - Vespers - published in Vanity Fair magazine, featured Christopher Robin for the first time.

Milne's most famous book is about a bear and his adventures in the woods which was followed by House at Pooh Corner, though he did write adult literature as well such as the detective story The Red House Mystery which was better received on the other side of the Atlantic.

Publishers were pressuring Alan Alexander for more children’s stories because this was where the money was, though Milne was reluctant to be typecast as a children’s writer and enjoyed the diversity of screen writing, stage plays, articles, poetry and non fiction.

Winnie the Pooh was named after Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed teddy bear originally called Edward, which is on display at the New York Public Library. Winnie is a Canadian black bear from Winnipeg given to London Zoo by a soldier and Pooh was a swan. 

The woods Pooh Bear plays in are Ashdown Forest in Sussex. The Hundred Acre Wood is a smaller version of the 500 actual acres and Pooh-sticks was played on the River Medway near Cotchford Farm by Christopher Robin Milne, when he was a child. 

House at Pooh Corner was published in 1928 and illustrated by EH Shepard. This is when we meet Tigger, the infamous bouncing tiger who was immortalised in the Disney films. The house is what Piglet and Pooh Bear build for Eeyore. It is suggested in this sequel that Christopher Robin is growing up when the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood throw him a farewell party at the end implying that he is off to boarding school.

AA Milne retired to his farm in Cotchford and died in 1956 after having a stroke and brain surgery. Royalties from Disney’s movies of Pooh Bear all go to the Royal Literary Fund.

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