A.A. Milne

British · 1882 to 1956

Born Alan Alexander Milne on January 18, 1882, in Kilburn, London, to a Jamaican-born schoolmaster and his English wife, he grew up inside Henley House, the small independent school his father ran, and could read by the age of two. One of his teachers was the twenty-three-year-old H. G. Wells. He went up to Westminster on a scholarship and to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a mathematics one, but spent most of his undergraduate hours editing Granta with his brother Ken. Punch took him on in 1906; by twenty-four he was assistant editor. He served on the Somme as a signals officer, caught trench fever, and was invalided home in 1917 to write propaganda for the secret unit MI7. After the war he wrote light verse, mystery, and successful West End plays. His son Christopher Robin was born in 1920; a teddy bear bought from Harrods and a real black bear named Winnipeg at the London Zoo combined into the toy-shelf cosmology of When We Were Very Young (1924), Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Now We Are Six (1927), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), illustrated by E. H. Shepard in lines as quiet as Milne's prose. The four books outsold everything else he had written or ever would write, a fact that came to grieve him; his adult son later wrote a memoir describing the cost of being made a fictional child. Milne played cricket for the Authors XI alongside J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. A stroke in 1952 left him an invalid. He died at Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, on January 31, 1956, at seventy-four.