“The only excuse which I have yet discovered for writing anything is that I want to write it.” Many a frustrated author has uttered some version of this sentiment after encountering financial duress or a disinterested audience. Far more rare are those authors whose writing brings them widespread acclaim and a pirate’s treasure in sales—and yet feel like their true literary genius has gone unappreciated. 

Count among them A. A. Milne, the author of the above quote and the famous creator of “Winnie the Pooh” and all his fantastical friends—and also a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and, by many accounts, disappointed intellectual. Pooh made Milne rich, but not for the reasons the author wanted.

Milne was born in London in 1882. A precocious child, he attended a small school run by his father (one of his teachers? H. G. Wells!) and later graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in mathematics. His articles for a student magazine there drew the attention of the editors of Punch, a venerable British humor magazine, where he contributed essays and became an assistant editor in 1906. He served as an officer in the British army during World War I, and his experiences in that conflict led him to write an antiwar nonfiction book, Peace with Honour.

Milne found modest success as a novelist and a playwright in his 20s and 30s, including a 1922 murder mystery, The Red House Mystery. Though he never considered himself primarily a children’s author, after the birth of his son (you guessed it) Christopher Robin in 1920, he produced collections of poems and short stories for children that formed the basis for his “Winnie the Pooh” books. Milne was also a successful screenwriter in the early days of that industry in Great Britain.

In 1924, Milne produced When We Were Very Young, a book of children’s poetry that introduced the character of Winnie (named after a famous bear at the London Zoo). A short story collection, Winnie-the-Pooh, arrived two years later and introduced the home of Pooh and his animal confreres, the “Hundred Acre Wood.” A second poetry volume in 1927, Now We Are Six, and another short story collection a year later, The House at Pooh Corner, rounded out the true Pooh canon, though many consider “The Mandalorian” and Heir to the Empire to be canon as well. (Sorry: nerd joke.) All four books were illustrated by E. H. Shepard.

The books found commercial success far in excess of anything else Milne would write before or after, with Winnie-the-Pooh selling 150,000 copies in the United States in its first year alone. Adaptations into other media followed almost immediately (and Winnie lost his hyphens over time); eventually the plays and radio shows gave way to animated movies, cartoons, toys and even the occasional philosophy book intended, if I remember correctly, to be hanging slightly out of a student’s backpack on the way to class: The Tao of Pooh. 

America’s editors and contributors praised the Pooh books as charming and imaginative; his more intellectual adult fare drew mixed reviews. A long treatment in 1930 of his play “Michael and Mary” was mostly positive, but in 1932 the magazine had harsher words for his comedic play “They Don’t Mean Any Harm.” 

Not many years ago Mr. A. A. Milne was one of England’s most delightful humorists. He was an editor of Punch. He wrote captivating stories and jingles for children. He wrote comedies which made the world smile happily. Then fame and fortune came to him, and he turned bitter. He decided that everything was all wrong. Perhaps the sudden warp in his nature was the result of too frequently being called “whimsical.” It is said he violently objected to this description. Whatever the explanation, here he is, the world’s finest example of the corroding power of success.

In 1934, his novel Four Days’ Wonder earned a kinder treatment, even if the reviewer did call it “whimsical,” a word that seems to have haunted Milne. The book was praised for its “graceful lyric style,” and the reviewer noted that “Milne’s astute understanding makes his women characters living realities.”

Almost a century later, a 2021 Scripture reflection in America asked a question that surely would have horrified the atheist author, but nonetheless wins some bonus points for religion clickbait: “What do Winnie the Pooh and Christ’s Ascension have in common?” You’ll have to read it to find out!

Milne served in the British Home Guard during World War II. In 1952, he suffered a serious stroke; he died four years later at the age of 74. His son Christopher Robin Milne enjoyed some success as a memoirist but was also estranged from his father for long periods; he once wrote that his father “had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”

A movie about the relationship between Milne and his son, “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” was reviewed in America in 2017 by Haley Stewart. The film, Stewart wrote, “manages to present the reality of life’s complications. It shows how we live in a world of magical forests and trench warfare, how a book can spark joy for millions and result in misery for a neglected child, how parents can love their child and fail to offer the affection he craves.”

Milne never wrote another Pooh book after the first four, though he produced seven novels, five nonfiction works, over 30 plays and a trove of screenplays. His famous bear, he later lamented, had ruined the public’s appetite for anything more substantial that might come from his pen. “It seems to me now that if I write anything less realistic, less straightforward than ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ I am ‘indulging in a whimsy,’” he wrote in 1928. “Indeed if I did say that the cat sat on the mat (as well it might), I should be accused of being whimsical about cats; not a real cat, but just a little make-believe pussy, such as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh invents so charmingly for our delectation.”

Though Milne’s characters—not just Pooh but also Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and even Christopher Robin—are now in the public domain, the rights to the “Winnie the Pooh” franchise are owned by the Walt Disney Company. Pooh’s image is now one of the most recognizable in the world—though perhaps not in China, where a Pooh movie was banned after memes circulated online comparing the portly bear to well-fed Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Random fact: Milne was also an excellent cricket player, and played on many amateur teams that featured other writers and artists. These squads were usually headed up by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, and over the years included famous authors like G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, the aforementioned Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and more. Almost all were terrible athletes and worse cricketers; one exception was Milne, who was widely recognized by his peers as a tremendous athlete, if perhaps a bit of an Eeyore otherwise.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Novena That Carried Me,” by Asha Mirriam. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.