It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer

Overview
A. A. Milne’s 1939 autobiography is a nimble, self-possessed tour of a professional life spent chasing, catching, and then being captured by words. Written with his trademark urbanity and shrugging humor, it maps the path from precocious schoolboy to Punch writer, war officer, West End playwright, accidental detective novelist, and finally the reluctant proprietor of an international menagerie led by Pooh. Milne frames his life in terms of work rather than spectacle, steering away from confession and toward the craft of making sentences, magazines, plays, and books that do what he asks of them.

Early Years and Apprenticeship
Milne was born in 1882 into a household shaped by teaching and comic disputation. His father ran Henley House School in London, where H. G. Wells once taught, and that atmosphere of brisk intellect and anti-pedantry shadows the book. Westminster School and a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, follow. At Cambridge he finds a proving ground in undergraduate journalism, contributing to and helping to edit the student magazine. The apprenticeship hardens into vocation when he goes to London, sells jokes and essays, and in 1906 joins the staff of Punch, eventually becoming its assistant editor under Owen Seaman. Milne presents Punch as a workshop: deadlines as discipline, editors as useful resistances, humor as an art of economy.

War and Professional Pivot
The First World War interrupts and reorients him. Commissioned in the British Army, he serves at the front and later in a signals and intelligence capacity in London. The book treats the war without melodrama: a draining of illusions, a tally of absences, and an aftertaste that reshapes his sense of what counts on the page. When he returns to civilian writing, it is with a renewed appetite for clarity and a suspicion of posturing.

Plays, Essays, and a Detective Diversion
The 1920s bring a burst of stage success, light comedies like Mr. Pim Passes By and The Dover Road, alongside essay collections that refine the personable voice he honed at Punch. He writes The Red House Mystery in 1922, a tidy country-house puzzle whose popularity surprises him. He explains why he leaves the genre after one go: the machinery of detection pleases the head but risks crowding out the human quiddities that interest him more. He also adapts Kenneth Grahame for the stage in Toad of Toad Hall, a tribute to playfulness that anticipates his most famous turn.

Pooh and the Burden of Delight
Marriage to Daphne de Sélincourt and the birth of their son, Christopher Robin, open a domestic vein. Poems first, collected in When We Were Very Young, then stories illustrated by E. H. Shepard: Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six, The House at Pooh Corner. Milne records the joy of making a clean, light music that children hear and adults half-remember, and the oddity of discovering that such music drowns out his other compositions. He admits to ambivalence: pride in the books’ craft and warmth; worry about turning his son into a public character; frustration at being filed forever under “children’s author.”

Craft, Character, and the Business of Writing
Threaded through the chronology are gently combative essays on method. He praises revision, distrusts purple, and argues that style is not decoration but the shortest path between mind and reader. He is keen on luck, the right editor at the right time, and honest about money and theaters and publishers, the scaffolding without which literary towers don’t stand. Places matter, too: Cotchford Farm in Sussex and the nearby Ashdown Forest become a quiet, literal ground for imagination.

Perspective
By 1939, with Europe darkening again, Milne looks back less to settle scores than to set proportions. He prefers small truths well said to big statements ill made; he honors work done cleanly; he registers the cost of fame and the ways it simplifies a complicated life. It is a writer’s autobiography in the strict sense: a record of how he made things, why he made them, and what those makings made of him.