A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne was an English writer born in Kilburn, London, on 18 January 1882. He grew up in a schoolroom world: Henley House School, the small independent school run by his father, John Vine Milne. He taught himself to read at the age of two, and one of his teachers was H. G. Wells. Milne went on to Westminster School and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied on a mathematics scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1903. Writing, however, had already claimed him. At Cambridge he edited and wrote for Granta, sometimes working with his brother Kenneth under the initials AKM.

After university, Milne’s comic verse and whimsical essays brought him to Punch, the leading British humour magazine. He joined the staff in 1906 and became an assistant editor. Before Winnie-the-Pooh made his name familiar to generations of readers, Milne was primarily a playwright; in this period he published 18 plays and three novels, including the murder mystery The Red House Mystery in 1922. He also wrote for the early British film industry, providing four stories filmed in 1920 for Minerva Films: The Bump, Twice Two, Five Pound Reward, and Bookworms.

Milne’s life was also marked by military service. During the First World War he joined the British Army and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was commissioned in 1915, served on the Somme as a signals officer from July to November 1916, caught trench fever, and was invalided back to England. After recuperating, he worked as a signals instructor and was later recruited into military intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI7(b) between 1917 and 1918. After the war he wrote Peace with Honour in 1934, a denunciation of war, though he retracted it somewhat with War with Honour in 1940. In the Second World War he served as a captain in the British Home Guard in Hartfield and Forest Row, while asking the members of his platoon to call him plain “Mr. Milne.”

The books for which Milne is best known grew from family life. He married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913, and their son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. In 1924 Milne published When We Were Very Young, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by E. H. Shepard. The Winnie-the-Pooh stories followed from Christopher Robin’s toys and from a visit to London Zoo, where the boy became fond of Winnipeg, a tame and friendly bear. Christopher’s stuffed bear, first named Edward, became Winnie-the-Pooh; Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger also came from the nursery. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son’s teddy bear, Growler, as a model.

Milne knew that success could narrow how others saw a writer. He once observed that publishers and agents kept urging him toward whatever had just sold well, while his own reason for writing was simply that he wanted to write. That independence helps explain the range of his work, from humour and plays to detective fiction, children’s verse, film stories, and the Pooh books that overshadowed the rest. After a stroke and brain surgery in 1952, he retired to Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, and died in January 1956 at the age of 74. He left the original manuscripts of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories to the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, his alma mater.