Milne, Alan Alexander

Milne, Alan Alexander (1882-1956), author, b. London.

A. A. Milne began writing for magazines at the age of twenty-one and later worked for the famous magazine Punch.

He wrote articles and later plays which made people laugh.

Then he began writing poems for his three year old son, Christopher Robin. The first of these, Vespers (or Christopher Robin is saying his prayers) became very popular and it and other poems were published in 1924 in a book called When We Were Very Young.

This was followed, three years later, by Now We Are Six and then by two books of stories, Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

Most of the characters in these stories, including the bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, were based on Christopher Robin Milne's toys. Today these toys can be seen in a glass case in the offices of the publishers E. P. Dutton and Co. (now part of Penguin Group) in New York, and the Pooh stories still remain popular.

A. A. Milne also wrote a play for children, Toad of Toad Hall (1929), from Kenneth Grahame's book, The Wind in the Willows, and a one-act play, The Ugly Duckling (1943).