Background

Alan Alexander Milne was born in London, United Kingdom on January 18, 1882; the son of John Vine Milne and Sarah Marie Milne (née Heginbotham). His closest family relationship was with his brother Ken. Alan and Ken remained best friends until Ken died of tuberculosis in 1929. In contrast, Alan and his brother Barry were not close.

Education

Milne entered Westminster School in 1893 and in 1900, he progressed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied on a mathematics scholarship. While at Cambridge, he edited and wrote for The Granta, a student magazine. He took a degree in mathematics in 1903.

Career

In 1906 Milne joined the staff of Punch, becoming an assistant editor and staying there until 1914. During his time there he wrote a number of plays and novels.

In 1915 Milne joined the service during World War I as a signaling officer. Wounded in France, he was discharged in 1919 and thereafter devoted himself full time to writing. During his military service, Milne had written his first play, a one-act farce titled Wurzel-Flummery.

During the 1920s, his writing continued to meet with success. His comedies of the early 1920s, including Mr. Pim Passes By (1921) and The Dover Road (1921), were enthusiastically received by critics and audiences. He also penned a detective novel titled The Red House Mystery, published in 1922. In 1929 he wrote a stage adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book The Wind in the Willows, titled Toad of Toad Hall.

In 1925, he wrote, "When we were very Young," a book for the child in all of us. In the next four years, Milne would write four Pooh books, and each turned into runaway best sellers. He used his son, Christopher Robin, and several of his son's stuffed animals, those stuffed animals of a friend of his son, and his imagination to create the adventures of a young boy, Christopher Robin, and his bear, Winnie the Pooh. Winnie-the-Pooh was the central character, accompanied by fussy Rabbit, gloomy donkey Eeyore, bouncy tiger Tigger, kind kangaroo Kanga and her baby Roo, wise Owl and shy Piglet.

In the 1930s and '40s, A.A. Milne returned to writing for adults, publishing novels, short-story collections and a non-fiction, anti-war book entitled Peace with Honour. He wrote his autobiography, It's Too Late Now, in 1939.

During World War II, Milne was Captain of the British Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row.

Achievements

• The adventures of Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood, illustrated by artist Ernest H. Shepard, were all best-sellers and made Milne a household name. The books were translated into virtually every language in the world and were made into successful Pooh cartoons by the Walt Disney Company, as well as several movies. Winnie the Pooh is the second most valuable character after Mickey Mouse.
  
  Milne also wrote many novels, non-fiction books, plays and poetry collections for adults. Several of Milne's children's poems were set to music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson.
  
  Posthumously, Milne won the Lewis Caroll Shelf Award in 1958.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Table Near the Band

    (A Table Near the Band is a collection of thirteen short s...)

    1950
  • The Magic Hill

    (Blessed with making flowers wherever she goes, Princess D...)

    1937
  • Wurzel-Flummery

    (Two British members of Parliament, one an elder conservat...)

    1917
  • The Birthday Party: and other stories

    (Here’s an anthology on varied and various themes from a c...)

    1950
  • The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh

    (This exquisite, deluxe edition contains the complete illu...)

    1994
  • Now We are Six

    (Here are the poems of childhood, of summer days at the be...)

    1927
  • Chloe Marr

    (In this 1946 novel, Chloe Marr is young, beautiful and so...)

    1946
  • The Red House Mystery

    (Mark Ablett's house party goes well until his brother Rob...)

    1922
  • Pooh's Library

    (Winnie-The-Pooh, The House At Pooh Corner, When We Were V...)

    1926
  • Four Days' Wonder

    (Jenny Windell is a teenage girl who’s fascinated with mur...)

    1933
  • The Ugly Duckling

    (Arrangements have been made for Prince Simon to marry Pri...)

    1941
  • A Gallery of Children

    (Eleven brief tales recounting the adventures of a variety...)

    1925
  • The Sunny Side

    ("The Sunny Side" is a collection of short stories and ess...)

    1921
  • Positively Pooh: Timeless Wisdom from Pooh

    (Featuring favorite quotes from the original texts and E. ...)

  • Two People

    (Reminiscent in style and subject to Evelyn Waugh, A. A. M...)

    1931
  • The House at Pooh Corner

    (Return to the Hundred Acre Wood in A.A. Milne’s second co...)

    1928
  • It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer

    (A charming memoir by A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie-the-P...)

    1939
  • Year In, Year Out

    (Mr. Milne has here gathered together a fine and varied co...)

    1952
  • When We Were Very Young

    (A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young is a collection of ...)

    1924
  • Lovers in London 1905
  • Once on a Time 1917
  • Mr. Pim 1921
  • Peace with Honour 1934
  • The Day's Play 1910
  • The Holiday Round 1912
  • Once a Week 1914
  • Those Were The Days 1929
  • The Chronicles of Clovis 1911
  • Not that it Matters 1919
  • If I May 1920
  • By Way of Introduction 1929
  • The Secret and other stories 1929
  • For The Luncheon Interval 1925
  • Behind the Lines 1940
  • The Norman church 1948
  • Belinda 1918
  • The Camberley Triangle 1919
  • The Romantic Age 1920
  • Toad of Toad Hall 1929
  • The Ivory Door 1929
  • The Fourth Wall 1928

Religion

Milne did not speak out much on the subject of religion, although he used religious terms to explain his decision, while remaining a pacifist, to join the British Home Guard: "In fighting Hitler," he wrote, "we are truly fighting the Devil, the Anti-Christ ... Hitler was a crusader against God."

Politics

During World War I, Milne saw action as a soldier, including at the Battle of the Somme. When illness rendered him unfit for the front, his writing talent led to his being tapped to join a secret propaganda unit, MI7b, in 1916.

At the time, the mounting toll of World War I had dimmed public support and an anti-war movement was growing. The goal of Milne's propaganda unit was to bolster support for the war by writing about British heroism and German dastardliness.

Despite being a pacifist, Milne followed the orders he’d been given. But at the end of the war he was able to express how he'd felt about the work. Before the group disbanded, a farewell pamphlet, The Green Book, was put together. It contained contributions from many MI7b writers - and Milne's sentiments can be seen in these lines of verse:

"In MI7B,

Who loves to lie with me

About atrocities

And Hun Corpse Factories."

Views

Quotations: "Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them."

"People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day."

"I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time."

"I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen."

"Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart."

"Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day."

"Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would, I'd never leave."

"One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries."

"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: In October 1952, Alan had a stroke, which left him invalid more than three years, before he breathed his last on January 31, 1956.

Quotes from others about the person

• J. M. DeMatteis: "I love kids’ fantasy...everything from L. Frank Baum to A. A. Milne … Narnia to Wonderland to Neverland. These are magical stories that nurtured me as a child and then nurtured my own children, as well. What better legacy could a writer have than to continue that wonderful tradition of imagination and insight and adventure?"
  
  Dorothy Parker: "And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

Connections

On June 24, 1913, Milne married Daphne de Selincourt, goddaughter of Owen Seaman; they would have only one child, Christopher Robin Milne, born in 1920. In 1925, A. A. Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. Milne's son, whom he called "Billy Moon" became his muse for many of the children's verses he composed, as well as the Winnie the Pooh books. The woods surrounding Cotchford Farm were the model for 1000 Acre Woods described as Winnie the Pooh and friends' home in the well-known stories.

Father:

John Vine Milne

Mother:

Sarah Maria Heginbotham

Wife:

Dorothy de Selincourt

Son:

Christopher Robin Milne

Christopher Robin Milne (21 August 1920 – 20 April 1996) was an English bookseller and the only son of author A. A. Milne. As a child, he was the basis of the character Christopher Robin in his father's Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in two books of poems.

References

• A.A.Milne: His Life A study of the life of A.A.Milne, from his childhood, when he was educated at his father's school Henley House and taught by H.G.Wells, through his early days on "Granta" and "Punch", to the flowering of his careeer in the 1920s and 1930s.
  1990
• In Which Milne's Life Is Told: A Biography of Winnie the Pooh Author A.A. Milne This biography traces Milne’s life, influence and legacy.
  2014
• A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh Portrays the life and career of the successful playwright who was never able to shake the public's idea that he only wrote for children
  1990
• The Extraordinary Life of A A Milne The Extraordinary Life of AA Milne delves deep into the life of Milne and sheds light on new places, and tells stories untold.
  2018
• Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh Goodbye Christopher Robin is a story of celebrity, a story of both the joys and pains of success and, ultimately, the story of how one man created a series of enchanting tales that brought hope and comfort to an England ravaged by the First World War.
  2017