AA Milne and the Curse of Pooh Bear

Author AA Milne wrote seven full-length novels in his life. He also wrote regularly for Punch magazine and was eventually an assistant editor there. Milne also served as the editor of Granta magazine. He wrote five non-fiction books and 34 plays. But Milne is almost solely remembered for the four short children’s books he wrote about his son about a stuffed bear named Winnie the Pooh.

The children’s books added up to just 70,000 words, the length of an average novel. But their enormous fame erased the memory of all the work he’d already done.
The success of the Pooh stories also undermined the reception of the non-juvenile work Milne wrote later. “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’,” Milne wrote in the introduction to his play The Ivory Door 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.”

Pooh illustrator EH Shepard suffered the same fate, being typecast as a children’s book illustrator, when he’d made his name as a political cartoonist before. But the worst of the typecasting curse fell to Milne’s son Christopher Robin Milne. Read about how Winnie the Pooh followed him around all his life at BBC Culture.