He felt it was time he “said goodbye to all that” in order to change literary direction once more, something he’d been so adept at in the past. It was around then that Milne decided to stop writing children’s books. And he is the father of Christopher Robin.” His plays have been successfully produced in New York. Children’s poet laureate by divine right of whimsy. As one Town and Country article put it in a photograph caption, Milne was an “English playwright. As the inspiration for Christopher Robin, in some ways Milne’s son was even more famous than his father. “We each had our sorrows.”Īfter all, Milne wasn’t the only one who struggled with Winnie the Pooh’s fame. “His skill had not deserted him, but his public had and eventually the editor, EV Knox, wrote to tell him so,” his son Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places. But not even his former readers would take him back. Before his death, he called Pooh “that silly old bear” and expressed regret that he’d ever taken part.Īfter the Winnie the Pooh books, Milne tried to write for Punch again. His collaborator, the Punch political cartoonist turned Pooh illustrator EH Shepard, felt the same. “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.”

“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. The success of the Pooh stories also undermined the reception of the non-juvenile work Milne wrote later.

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