A. A. Milne Biography

Attr: Emil Otto Hoppé - Shadowland, September 1922

Born as	Alan Alexander Milne
Occup.	Author
From	England
Born	January 18, 1882 Kilburn, London, United Kingdom
Died	January 31, 1956 Hartfield, East Sussex, United Kingdom
Cause	Stroke
Aged	74 years

Early Life and Education
Alan Alexander Milne was born on 18 January 1882 in Kilburn, London, the youngest of three sons of John Vine Milne, a schoolmaster who ran Henley House School, and Sarah Maria Milne (née Heginbotham). He received his earliest education at his father’s school, where one of his teachers for a time was H. G. Wells, an encounter Milne later remembered with admiration. Milne won a scholarship to Westminster School and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. At Cambridge he began writing in earnest, contributing humorous pieces to the student magazine Granta and discovering that his real gift lay not in numbers but in words.

Early Writing and Punch
After graduating, Milne moved into London’s literary world. He freelanced for several publications before his light verse and comic sketches for Punch, the influential humor weekly, brought him steady attention. He joined the Punch staff in 1906 and, over the next decade, became one of its most distinctive voices and a de facto assistant editor. Under editor Sir Owen Seaman, Milne developed the crisp, urbane tone and comic timing that would mark his essays, plays, and later stories.

War Service and Dramatic Success
During the First World War, Milne was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and served on the Western Front before being transferred to the War Office, where he wrote for MI7(b), the government’s wartime propaganda unit. The experience left him skeptical of militarism, a stance he would articulate in his polemical book Peace with Honour (1934).

In the years immediately after the war, Milne enjoyed notable success as a dramatist. Mr. Pim Passes By (1919) was a transatlantic hit; The Dover Road (1921) and The Truth About Blayds (1921) consolidated his reputation for elegant, witty stage comedies. He also published a celebrated detective novel, The Red House Mystery (1922), admired for its nimble plotting and light touch.

The World of Winnie-the-Pooh
Milne’s enduring fame rests on a quartet of books he wrote for and about his son, Christopher Robin Milne. When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927) are verse collections that introduced readers to a small boy and his bear; the story collections Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) make that world complete. The bear’s name combined “Winnie,” a popular Canadian black bear at the London Zoo (short for “Winnipeg”), with “Pooh,” a whimsical name Milne had given a swan in an earlier poem.

The stories’ landscape, the Hundred Acre Wood, was inspired by Ashdown Forest near the Milnes’ home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. Christopher Robin’s real toys, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and later Tigger, became the books’ beloved characters, while Owl and Rabbit were based on real animals of the forest. E. H. Shepard’s line drawings, recommended to Milne by their mutual Punch colleague E. V. Lucas, were integral to the books’ tone; Shepard sketched on walks through the forest to ground his illustrations in a recognizably English countryside.

The Pooh books were an immediate, international sensation. Their gentle humor, philosophical simplicity, and musical language appealed to children and adults alike. Yet success brought complications. Milne, an established playwright and essayist, worried about being known only as a children’s author; later he remarked that Pooh had overshadowed his other work to a degree he had not anticipated.

Other Writing, Views, and Controversies
Milne’s range was broad. He adapted Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall (1929), wrote additional plays and essays, and published his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939). A critic of war in the 1930s, he reversed himself after Hitler’s aggression, arguing in War with Honour (1940) that resisting Nazism was a moral necessity. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard in Sussex.

Milne also entered public literary debates. He was sharply critical of P. G. Wodehouse’s 1941 radio broadcasts made while Wodehouse was interned by the Germans, a stance that led to a lasting feud between the two once-friendly humorists.

Personal Life
Milne married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913. Their only child, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920 and became, to his parents’ surprise, a public figure as the child-hero of his father’s books. The family divided their time between London and Cotchford Farm. In later years, the intense publicity surrounding the Pooh books complicated relations within the family, especially between father and son, who at times struggled with the uses of his childhood persona in the public eye.

Illness and Death
Milne’s health declined after the war years. He suffered a serious stroke and underwent brain surgery in 1952, after which he never fully recovered. He died at Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, on 31 January 1956, aged 74.

People Around Him
Over the course of his life, Milne moved through overlapping circles of schoolroom, magazine, theater, and family. His father, John Vine Milne, shaped his early education; H. G. Wells, briefly his teacher, embodied the intellectual curiosity Milne admired. At Punch he worked under Sir Owen Seaman and alongside friends such as essayist E. V. Lucas, who steered him toward illustrator E. H. Shepard, Milne’s most important creative collaborator on the Pooh books. In the theater he shared stages and seasons with contemporaries who revived West End comedy after the First World War. At home, his wife, Daphne, and their son, Christopher Robin, were the emotional core and inspiration for his most famous work. His public quarrel with P. G. Wodehouse revealed the fault lines in Britain’s literary world during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s. In America, the entrepreneur Stephen Slesinger licensed Pooh for transatlantic publication and merchandising in 1930, paving the way for the character’s later global reach.

Legacy
A. A. Milne’s legacy rests on both craft and character. His essays and plays exemplify the precision, civility, and wit of early twentieth‑century English letters; his children’s books, grounded in the everyday affections of family life and in a specific English landscape, proved universal. The Pooh stories’ blend of comedy, quiet wisdom, and lyrical prose, brought to visual life by E. H. Shepard, became a touchstone of modern children’s literature. Later stage adaptations, translations, and screen versions carried Pooh into world culture, but the original books remain distinguished by their intimacy of voice and their confidence that small adventures, faithfully told, can illuminate large truths.

Our collection contains 19 quotes who is written / told by A. Milne.

Related authors: P. G. Wodehouse (Writer), Christo (Artist), Kenneth Grahame (Novelist), Philo (Philosopher), Lawrence Taylor (Athlete)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: AA Milne son
A: Christopher Robin Milne.
Q: Daphne Milne
A: A. A. Milne’s wife, Daphne de Sélincourt; mother of Christopher Robin.
Q: Aa milne pronunciation
A: ay-ay MILN (Milne = miln).
Q: A. A. Milne cause of death
A: Complications from a stroke.
Q: Aa milne books
A: Winnie-the-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner; When We Were Very Young; Now We Are Six; The Red House Mystery.
Q: Christopher Robin Milne
A: A. A. Milne’s son; inspiration for Christopher Robin; later an author and bookseller.
Q: How old was A. A. Milne?
A: He became 74 years old