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Definition: A. A. Milne

Part of SpeechDefinition
Noun1. English writer of stories for children (1882-1956).[Wordnet].

Source: WordNet 3.0 Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

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Extended Definition: A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

Born January 18, 1882(1882-01-18)
Hampstead, London, England
Died January 31, 1956 (aged 74)
Hartfield, Sussex, England
Occupation Novelist, Playwright, Poet

Alan Alexander Milne (pronounced /ˈmɪln/) (January 18, 1882 – January 31, 1956), also known as A. A. Milne, was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.

Biography

A.A Milne was born in Hampstead, London, England and grew up at Henley House School, 6/7 Mortimer Road, Kilburn, London, a small independent school run by his father, John V. Milne. One of his teachers was H. G. Wells. He attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied on a mathematics scholarship. While there, he edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine. He collaborated with his brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM. Milne's work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch, where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor.

Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace with Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War with Honour. During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the lighthearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of near treason by cooperating with his country's enemy. (Wodehouse got some revenge by creating fatuous parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories.)

During World War II, he was Captain of the Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row, insisting on being plain 'Mr. Milne' to the members of his platoon.

Milne married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt in 1913, and their only son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. In 1925, A. A. Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. He retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid. Cotchford Farm was where the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist Brian Jones would later live and be found drowned in 1969. Cotchford Farm has since been demolished, due to the excessive maintenance and repair costs, and a new house built on the site.

Literary career

Milne is most famous for his Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin, after his son, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin's bear, originally named "Edwin," was renamed "Winnie-the-Pooh" after a Canadian black bear named Winnie (after Winnipeg), that was used as a military mascot in World War I, and left to London Zoo after the war. "The pooh" comes from a swan called "Pooh." E. H. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son's teddy, Growler ("a magnificent bear"), as the model. Christopher Robin Milne's own toys are now under glass in New York.

Milne also wrote a number of poems, including Vespers, They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace, and King John's Christmas, which were published in the books When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Several of Milne's children's poems were set to music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied many times, including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We Are Sixty.

The overwhelming success of his children's books was to become a source of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever he pleased, and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing in The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by Raymond Chandler for the implausibility of its plot). Indeed, Milne's publisher was displeased when he announced his intention to write poems for children, and he had never lacked an audience.

But once Milne had, in his own words, "said Goodbye to all that in 70,000 words" (the approximate length of the four children's books), he had no intention of producing a copy of a copy, given that one of the sources of inspiration, his son, was growing older.

His reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play ("God help it") was simply "Christopher Robin grown up ... what an obsession with me children are become!"

Even his old literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very Young verses had first appeared, was ultimately to reject him, as Christopher Milne details in his autobiography The Enchanted Places, although Methuen continued to publish whatever Milne wrote, including the long poem 'The Norman Church' and an assembly of articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne likened to a benefit night for the author).

He also adapted Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall. The title was an implicit admission that such chapters as Chapter 7, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, could not survive translation to the theatre. A special introduction written by Milne is included in some editions of Grahame's novel.

After Milne's death, his widow sold the rights to the Pooh characters to the Walt Disney Company, which has made a number of Pooh cartoon movies, as well as a large amount of Pooh-related merchandise. She also destroyed his papers.

Royalties from the Pooh characters paid by Disney to the Royal Literary Fund, part-owner of the Pooh copyright, provide the income used to run the Fund's Fellowship Scheme, placing professional writers in UK universities.

Works

Novels

  • Lovers in London, (1905) (Some consider this more of a short story collection; Milne didn't like it and considered The Day's Play as his first book)
  • Once on a Time, (1917) [a fairytale with an adult slant]
  • Mr. Pim, (1921)
  • The Red House Mystery, (1921)
  • Two People, (1931) (Inside jacket claims this is Milne's first attempt at a novel.)
  • Four Days' Wonder, (1933)
  • Chloe Marr, (1946)

Non-fiction

Punch articles:

Selections of Newspaper Articles and Introductions to Books by Others

Story collections for children

  • Gallery of Children (1925)
  • Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
  • The House at Pooh Corner (1928) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
  • Short Stories
  • A Table Near the Band (1950)

Poetry

For the Luncheon Interval [poems from Punch]

  • When We Were Very Young, (1924) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
  • Now We Are Six, (1927) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
  • Behind the Lines, (1940)
  • The Norman Church, (1948)

Plays

Milne wrote over 25 plays including:

Books on Pooh and Milne

  • Crews, Frederick, The Pooh Perplex, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2003 (1st ed. 1963) ISBN 0-226-12058-9
  • Crews, Frederick, Postmodern Pooh, New York, North Point Press, 2001 ISBN 0-86547-654-3
  • Hoff, Benjamin, The Tao of Pooh, New York, Penguin, 1983 ISBN 0-14-006747-7
  • Hoff, Benjamin, The Te of Piglet, New York, Dutton Adult, 1992 ISBN 0-525-93496-0
  • Milne, Christopher Robin and A. R. Melrose (ed.), Beyond the World of Pooh: Selections from the Memoirs of Christopher Milne, New York, Dutton, 1998 ISBN 0-525-45888-3
  • Thwaite, Ann, A. A. Milne: His Life, New York, Random House, 1990 ISBN 0-394-58724-3
  • Tyerman Williams, John, Pooh and the Philosophers: In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh, London, Methuen, 1995 ISBN 0-525-45520-5
  • Wullschlager, Jackie, Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne, New York & Detroit, The Free Press, 1996 ISBN 0-684-82286-5

Films

  • The Fourth Wall was made into a film called The Perfect Alibi
  • Michael and Mary was filmed in 1932

References

  • Thwaite, Ann (2004). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Milne, Alan Alexander. 

External links


Persondata
NAME Milne, A. A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Milne, Alan Alexander
SHORT DESCRIPTION Novelist, Playwright, Poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1882(1882-01-18)
PLACE OF BIRTH Scotland
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1956
PLACE OF DEATH Hartfield, Sussex, England

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "A. A. Milne". Image Credit.