A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882 – January 31, 1956), also known as A. A. Milne, was a British author, best known for his books about the animated teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and for various children's poems. Milne had made several reputations, most notably as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.

Easton Press A. A. Milne books

  Winnie The Pooh (4 Volume Set)

  Disney's Winnie The Pooh Christmas Treasury - 2002
  Disney's Winnie The Pooh Storybook Collection - 2003
  The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-The-Pooh - 2009

Franklin Library A. A. Milne books

  The Red House Mystery - Library of Mystery Masterpieces - 1990

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A. A. Milne biography

A. A. Milne was born in Kilburn, London, England to parents John Vine Milne and Sarah Maria (née Heginbotham)and grew up at Henley House School, 6/7 Mortimer Road (now Crescent), Kilburn, London, a small independent school run by his father. One of his teachers was H. G. Wells who taught there in 1889-90. Milne attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied on a mathematics scholarship. While there, he edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine. He collaborated with his brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM. Milne's work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch, where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor.

Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace With Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War With Honour. During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of English humour writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the lighthearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of near treason by cooperating with his country's enemy. Wodehouse got some revenge on his former friend by creating fatuous parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories, and claiming that Milne "was probably jealous of all other writers.... But I loved his stuff."

He married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt in 1913, and their only son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. In 1925, A. A. Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. During World War II, A. A. Milne was Captain of the Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row, insisting on being plain 'Mr. Milne' to the members of his platoon. He retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid and by August 1953 "he seemed very old and disenchanted". Cotchford Farm was where the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist Brian Jones would later live and be found drowned in 1969.

The Easton Press published the Winnie the Pooh classics as a 4 book set including Winnie The Pooh, When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six, and The House at Pooh Corner. The only A. A. Milne book published by the Franklin Library was The Red House Mystery.

Writing

Milne is most famous for his Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin, after his son, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. The source of the name is reputedly a Canadian black bear named Winnipeg Bear (after Winnipeg), that was used as a military mascot by the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, a Canadian Infantry Regiment in World War I, and left to London Zoo after the war. After its heroics On September 14 1915, the bear was named 'Winnie the Pooh', years before Milne adopted it. E. H. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son's teddy, Growler ("a magnificent bear"), as the model. Christopher Robin Milne's own toys are now under glass in New York.

Milne also wrote a number of poems, including Vespers, They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace, and King John's Christmas, which were published in the books When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Several of Milnes's children's poems were set to music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied many times, including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We Are Sixty.

The overwhelming success of his children's books was to become a source of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever he pleased, and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing in The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by Raymond Chandler for the implausibility of its plot). Indeed, Milne's publisher was displeased when he announced his intention to write poems for children, and he had never lacked an audience.

But once Milne had, in his own words, "said Goodbye to all that in 70,000 words" (the approximate length of the four children's books), he had no intention of producing a copy of a copy, given that one of the sources of inspiration, his son, was growing older.

His reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play ("God help it") was simply "Christopher Robin grown up ... what an obsession with me children are become!"

Even his old literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very Young verses had first appeared, was ultimately to reject him, as Christopher Milne details in his autobiography The Enchanted Places, although Methuen continued to publish whatever Milne wrote, including the long poem 'The Norman Church' and an assembly of articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne likened to a benefit night for the author).

He also adapted Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall. The title was an implicit admission that such chapters as Capter 7, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, could not survive translation to the theater. A special introduction written by Milne is included in some editions of Grahame's novel.

After Milne's death, his widow sold the rights to the Pooh characters to the Walt Disney Company, which has made a number of Pooh cartoon movies, as well as a large amount of Pooh-related merchandise. She also destroyed his papers.

Royalties from the Pooh characters paid by Disney to the Royal Literary Fund, part-owner of the Pooh copyright, provide the income used to run the Fund's Fellowship Scheme, placing professional writers in UK universities.

A. A. Milne Books

Lovers in London (1905)
Once on a Time (1917)
Mr. Pim (1921)
The Red House Mystery (1921)
Two People (1931)
Four Days' Wonder (1933)
Chloe Marr (1946)

Non-Fiction

When I Was Very Young (1930)
Peace With Honour (1934)
It's Too Late Now: the autobiography of a writer (1939)
War With Honour (1940)
Year In, Year Out (1952)

Punch articles

The Day's Play (1910)
Once a Week (1914)
The Holiday Round (1912)
The Sunny Side (1921)
Those Were the Days (1929)

Selections of newspaper articles and introductions to books by others

Not That It Matters (1920)
By Way of Introduction (1929)

Story Collections for Children

Gallery of Children (1925)
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
The House at Pooh Corner (1928) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)

Short Stories

A Table by the Band

Poetry

When We Were Very Young, (1924)
Now We Are Six, (1927)
Behind the Lines, (1940)
The Norman Church, (1948)

Plays

Wurzel-Flummery (1917)
Belinda (1918)
The Boy Comes Home (1918)
Make-Believe (1918) [a play for children]
The Camberley Triangle (1919)
Mr. Pim Passes By (1919)
The Red Feathers (1920)
The Romantic Age (1920)
The Stepmother (1920)
The Truth about Blayds (1920)
The Dover Road (1921)
The Lucky One (1922)
The Artist: a duologue (1923)
Give Me Yesterday (1923) [aka Success in the UK]
The Great Broxopp (1923)
Ariadne (1924)
The Man in the Bowler Hat: a terribly exciting affair" (1924)
To Have the Honour (1924)
Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers (1926)
Success (1926)
Miss Marlow at Play (1927)
The Fourth Wall or The Perfect Alibi (1928)
The Ivory Door (1929)
Toad of Toad Hall (1929)
Michael and Mary (1930)
Other People's Lives (1933)
Miss Elizabeth Bennett (1936)
Sarah Simple (1937)
Gentleman Unknown (1938)
The General Takes Off His Helmet (1939)
The Ugly Duckling (1946)
Before the Flood (1951)

 

 

Source and additional information: A. A. Milne