Alan Alexander Milne

Notable Works

• The Red House Mystery (1922) originally serialised in London's Daily News (1921)
• Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
• The House at Pooh Corner (1928)
• Toad of Toad Hall (1929) (play adaptation of The Wind in the Willows)

About

Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London to John and Sarah Milne on 18 January 1882 and grew up at Henley House, a small private school run by his father. One of his teachers was HG Wells. He attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge on a mathematics scholarship. At Cambridge, he edited and wrote for Granta magazine and later joined Punch as a contributor and later assistant editor.  He married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913. A talented cricket fielder, Milne played for two amateur teams of British writers: the Allahakbarries and Authors XI. His teammates included JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse. Milne was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1915 and served on the Somme as a signals officer, invalided back to England with trench fever. He was a signals instructor and joined Military Intelligence to write propaganda (1917-1918).

After WWI, he published 18 plays and three novels, including The Red House Mystery (1922). Milne was an early screenwriter for the nascent British film industry, writing four scripts in 1920 for actor Leslie Howard’s company, Minerva Films: The Bump; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms. In 1929, Milne adapted Kenneth Grahame’s novel The Wind in the Willows for the Liverpool Playhouse as Toad of Toad Hall. Performed in the West End in 1930, it has been revived regularly since. He bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in East Sussex. After the birth of his son Christopher Robin in 1920, Milne produced a collection of children’s poems, When We Were Very Young, illustrated by Punch staff cartoonist EH Shepard. Pooh first appeared in the London Evening News on Christmas Eve, 1925, featuring a boy named ‘Christopher Robin’ and toys named after his son’s stuffed animals, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. The books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) followed. Their success eclipsed his audience as a playwright and detective novelist and led to Milne feeling “amazement and disgust” over the immense fame his son was exposed to. Milne retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid; by August 1953, “he seemed very old and disenchanted.”  He died in 1956, aged 74.

The rights to AA Milne’s Pooh books were left to his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the Garrick Club. After Milne’s death in 1956, his widow sold her rights to Stephen Slesinger, whose widow, in turn, sold the rights after his death to the Walt Disney Company. In 2001, along with the other beneficiaries, the RLF sold their interest in the estate to the Disney Corporation for $350m. The sale of these rights enabled the RLF to establish a nationwide programme of RLF Fellows, enabling universities to host professional writers to work with students on their academic writing. The original manuscripts for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner were bequeathed by Milne to Trinity College Library. A memorial plaque in Ashdown Forest, unveiled by Christopher Robin in 1979, commemorates the work of AA Milne and EH Shepard, who “captured the magic of Ashdown Forest, and gave it to the world”.

Legacy

The sale of his rights enabled the RLF to establish a nationwide programme of RLF Fellows, allowing universities to host professional writers to work with students on their academic writing.

The original manuscripts for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner were bequeathed by Milne to Trinity College Library.