Winnie-the-Pooh

Before penning the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, Alan Alexander Milne was a comedy writer for Punch magazine in London, England, as well as a playwright and novelist. After Milne worked with illustrator E. H. Shepard on the successful children’s poetry collection When We Were Young, Shepard encouraged Milne to write more tales for children, and Milne found inspiration through his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and his stuffed animals. Christopher Robin changed the name of his real-life teddy bear from Edward to Winnie after he became enthralled with Winnipeg, a bear at the London Zoo, and A. A. Milne borrowed “Pooh” from a swan that Christopher Robin had given the name. Piglet, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore were based on Christopher Robin’s other toys, but Rabbit and Owl were products of A. A. Milne’s imagination. Prior to the publication of the Winnie-the-Pooh story collection, Pooh appeared as an unnamed bear in the Poem “Teddy Bear,” published in Punch in 1924. Pooh’s first appearance was on Christmas Eve of 1925, when a story entitled “The Wrong Sort of Bees” was published in the London Evening News. Milne later adapted this story into the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The world of Winnie-the-Pooh was based on a real place and brought to life by Shepard’s illustrations. Pooh and his friends reside in the Hundred Acre Wood, which Milne modeled after the Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest of southeast England, where he and Christopher Robin used to take walks. Today, Ashdown Forest serves as a tourist destination for those wishing to visit Pooh’s woods, featuring locations from the Pooh stories, such as The Heffalump Trap and Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place. The Hundred Acre Wood is also the backdrop for the tales in the subsequent volume of stories, The House at Pooh Corner, which introduces Tigger, a bouncing, tigerlike creature. Milne died without penning any additional works in the Pooh universe, and the next authorized Pooh book, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, written by David Benedictus and illustrated by Mark Burgess, wasn’t published until 2009.