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If a writer, why not write
On whatever comes in sight?
So — the Children's Books: a short
Intermezzo of a sort:
When I wrote them, little thinking
All my years of pen-and-inking
Would be almost lost among
Those four trifles for the young.[1]

This brief comment on A. A. Milne's literary career is perhaps more apt today than when he wrote it in 1952. He was never happy to be considered a children's author but preferred to be known as a dramatist. After his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he edited the undergraduate paper, The Granta, Milne's career developed in three definite stages. After graduation he free-lanced for three years before accepting the assistant editorship of Punch in 1906. He contributed many of the light verses and essays that appeared in that magazine for the following eight years and thereby established his reputation as a journalist and humorist.

With the advent of World War I, Milne joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and for the first time found the leisure to write plays. It was to the drama that Milne was most devoted and therein that he made his strongest claim for literary distinction. He became one of England's successful post-War dramatists with such plays as Mr. Pim Passes By, The Dover Road and The Truth about Blayds.

The third stage in Milne's career was inspired by his son, Christopher

Robin, and was begun by a request for a contribution to a children's magazine in 1923. After declining because he felt that children's literature was not in his line, Milne submitted "The Dormouse and the Doctor" and was unknowingly on his way to becoming famous as a writer for children. Other verses were added to "The Dormouse" and published in 1924 as When We Were Very Young. The popular success of this volume led inevitably to Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), a second volume of nonsense rhymes, Now We Are Six (1927), and another Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Following publication of When We Were Very Young, Milne tried in vain to make the playwright keep up with the children's author. He hated being referred to as "whimsical" and resented being remembered primarily for his light verse. Regardless of his wishes, however, it seems certain that the four books described in this paper will remain his most famous works and the basis of his literary reputation.[2]