The Man in the Bowler Hat: A Terribly Exciting Affair
1924
To Have the Honour
1924
Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers
1926
Miss Marlow at Play
1927
The Fourth Wall / The Perfect Alibi
1928
The Ivory Door
1929
Toad of Toad Hall
1929
Michael and Mary
1930
Other People’s Lives / They Don’t Mean Any Harm
1933
Miss Elizabeth Bennet
1936
Sarah Simple
1937
Gentleman Unknown
1938
The Ugly Duckling
1941
Before the Flood
1951
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
The Day’s Play
1910
The Holiday Round
1912
Once a Week
1914
Not That It Matters
1919
If I May
1920
The Sunny Side
1921
By Way of Introduction
1929
Peace with Honour
1934
It’s Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer / Autobiography
1939
War with Honour
1940
War Aims Unlimited
1941
Year In, Year Out
1952
About A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne (Alan Alexander Milne, 1882 to 1956) was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for his children’s poetry. Before “Winnie-the-Pooh” (1926) and “The House at Pooh Corner” (1928) he was known mainly as a playwright and as a humorist for the magazine Punch.
Milne was born in Kilburn, London, on 18 January 1882 and grew up at Henley House School, a small independent school run by his father, where H. G. Wells was one of his teachers. He went to Westminster School and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a mathematics scholarship, graduating in 1903. At Cambridge he edited and wrote for the student magazine Granta. He began contributing humorous verse and essays to Punch, joined its staff in 1906 and became an assistant editor.
During the First World War he served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, including a spell on the Somme as a signals officer in 1916, before being invalided home with trench fever. He married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913, and their son Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920. By the mid 1920s he had published 18 plays and three novels, among them the murder mystery “The Red House Mystery” (1922).
In 1924 he published “When We Were Very Young”, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by the Punch cartoonist E. H. Shepard. “Winnie-the-Pooh” followed in 1926, the verse collection “Now We Are Six” in 1927 and “The House at Pooh Corner” in 1928. The stories feature a boy named after his son and characters based on the boy’s stuffed toys: Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. Rabbit and Owl were Milne’s own inventions. The setting is drawn from Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, close to Cotchford Farm, the country home he bought in 1925.
Milne went on writing for adults after the Pooh books. His later work includes the novels “Two People”, “Four Days’ Wonder” and “Chloe Marr”, the stage play “Toad of Toad Hall” (adapted from “The Wind in the Willows”), the anti-war book “Peace with Honour” and an autobiography, “It’s Too Late Now”. A stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid, and he died in January 1956 aged 74. He left the Pooh manuscripts to the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge.
