Alan Alexander Milne (“A.A.” to you, me, and the rest of the world) wrote just four books for children, but what a quartet: his pair of verse collections, When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), and those two comparative volumes, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). All four were instant best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, beloved by kids and adults alike, as they remain to this day. I should confess right away that I have personally wept more than once at the ending of Pooh’s saga, in which he is banished to an uncomprehending limbo while his playmate, Christopher Robin, is shipped off to boarding school—the putting away of childish things and all that. It’s become sort of a literary party trick for me, the crying, almost Pavlovian but no less sincere.
The love isn’t universal. One early dissenter was Dorothy Parker, who panned the final book in her Constant Reader column for The New Yorker. She objected to Pooh’s coinage of the term “hummy” (something akin to hummable, but twee-er). As she famously wrote, “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
