A.A. Milne | 1882-1956 The man whose fame now rests on a "Bear of Very Little Brain" was actually something of a literary man-about-town in postwar London. In 1919 A.A. Milne's play, Mr. Pim Passes By, was staged to great acclaim, redeeming the disastrous publication of his first novel 14 years earlier and solidifying his contemporary reputation. A pacifist who fought in France during World War I (and who published Peace with Honour, a denunciation of war, in 1934), Milne was characterized by contradiction in his literary output as well. His worldly plays and novels, which were encouraged by his teacher and friend H.G. Wells, met with success in their day, but their names register now not at all in relation to the name of the stout golden bear with the "hunny" pot who was inspired not by a great thinker like Wells but rather by a collection of stuffed animals in the nursery of Milne's son. Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared publicly in 1924, with Milne's publication of When We Were Very Young, a collection of children's verse that had already appeared in Punch, where Milne had been an assistant editor until the war. Following this volume were Winnie-the-Pooh (1926); Now We Are Six, another verse collection (1927); and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Moving away from Pooh but still firmly in the realm of children's literature, Milne adapted Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows for the stage in 1930, calling it Toad of Toad Hall. There is some question among Pooh aficionados as to whether the stories about Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo and their adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood actually originated as bedtime stories for Christopher Robin, Milne's young son. What is not in dispute is the fact that the real Christopher Milne made a writing career late in life of distancing himself from his father and his creation. In three autobiographical volumes -- The Enchanted Places (1974), The Path Through the Trees (1979), and Hollow on the Hill (1982) -- Christopher Milne wrote of his father's remoteness and of the embarrassment he felt at being identified with Christopher Robin. In some ways, this sad fact is irrelevant to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and poems, all of which are a fantasy of a childhood idyll, in which imagination and "hunny" are the best sustainers of life.