It’s the birthday of A.A. Milne, best known as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. While Milne wrote only a few children’s books—Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, and two collections of poetry for children—the immense popularity of these works completely eclipsed Milne’s other writing and plunged him into a lifetime of bitterness. (Disclaimer: if depressing information about Winnie-the-Pooh’s creator and his son, the real Christopher Robin, is going to dismantle your dearest childhood memories, skip today’s post. Go back and read Dec. 27th’s post about Kepler, who failed to write a single children’s book as far as we know.)

Milne was born in 1882 in London, England, got a degree in mathematics at Cambridge in 1903, and then went to London to become a writer. (I know. I don’t get it either.) He wrote humorous poetry and essays for Punch, becoming assistant editor there, and started writing some of the seven novels, 34 plays, and five books of nonfiction that he would write in his lifetime. Yet once he’d become famous for Winnie-the-Pooh (first published as a collection in 1926), no one cared about his other writing—including his readers from Punch. The title of his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now (1939), kind of gives you a sense of how he felt about things. He died January 31, 1956, estranged from his son, Christopher Robin Milne.

So, yes, the son: plenty of bitterness to go around (but this one ends a little more happily, so hang in there). Christopher Robin (1920 – 1996) and his stuffed animals were indeed the inspiration for Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books, although Christopher Robin said as an adult that his father had no particular affinity for children. (His mother was no prize either; it was the nanny he loved.) As a child, Christopher Robin was exposed to a good deal of fame: he was given fan letters, photographed often, and even made a record and performed in a pageant. He enjoyed all this until boarding school, where the other boys tormented him mercilessly about the whole Winnie-the-Pooh thing. (Someday I’ll find  reference to a British male who did not have a terrible experience at boarding school. Someday. Maybe.) He grew to hate his very name and by the time he was out of university, harbored bitterness toward both parents. Then he married his first cousin, Lesley, which upset his parents (fair enough), and Lesley turned out to be good for him. They moved to Devon and became booksellers, and according to his friend Gyles Brandreth (English writer, actor, former MP), Christopher Robin had made his peace with who he was by the end of his life and was quite gracious about the whole thing.

Fun fact: Winnie-the-Pooh is the only book translated into Latin ever to hit the New York Times best seller list (1960). As Benjamin Franklin famously said, you just never know. (Okay, I don’t know if he said that. Probably at some point he did.)

Second fun fact: when Disney got its hands on the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, it dropped the hyphens. I’m keeping the hyphens. IN YOUR FACE, DISNEY. (That said, I’ve always liked the Disney movie version of Winnie-the-Pooh, but I sort of hate myself for it.)

Have a nice enough Thursday, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.