Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh

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About Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne And The

About the Author Ann Thwaite is a Whitbread-Prize-winning biographer and children’s writer. She was born in London and was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s, Barnet and St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has written several major biographies. A. A. Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 1990. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children’s Literature). She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D. Litt from Oxford. She lives in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. Product Description Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh is drawn from Ann Thwaite’s Whitbread Award-winning biography of A. A. Milne, one of England’s most successful writers. After serving in the First World War, Milne wrote a number of well-received plays, but his greatest triumph came when he created Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and, of course, Christopher Robin, the adventurous little boy based on his own son. Goodbye Christopher Robin inspired the film directed by Simon Curtis and starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald. It offers the reader a glimpse into the relationship between Milne and the real-life Christopher Robin, whose toys inspired the magical world of the Hundred Acre Wood. Goodbye Christopher Robin is a story of celebrity, a story of both the joys and pains of success and, ultimately, the story of how one man created a series of enchanting tales that brought hope and comfort to an England ravaged by the First World War. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Goodbye Christopher Robin A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh By Ann Thwaite St. Martin's PressCopyright © 2017 Ann Thwaite All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-250-19090-1 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, Preface by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Introduction, Before You Begin, 1. PLAYWRIGHT, 2. THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN, 3. WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG, 4. THE BEGINNINGS OF POOH, 5. WINNIE-THE-POOH, 6. THE END OF A CHAPTER, AFTERWORD, Photographs, Picture Acknowledgements, Also by Ann Thwaite, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 PLAYWRIGHT In 1922, the year A. A. Milne was forty and two years before the first of the famous children's books was published, a caption to his photograph in a London newspaper carried the words: 'Milne came to Fleet Street years ago in search of a fortune. As a dramatist, his income at times ranges from £200 to £500 a week.' This really was a fortune in 1922; it was more in a week than most people earned in a year. That joking boast, 'England's premier playwright', which Alan Milne had used when signing a letter to his brother Ken in 1917, was never exactly justified. But he was certainly one of England's most successful, prolific and best-known playwrights for a brief period, a fact that now seems almost incredible, when so many people who know his name and love his books have no idea that he ever wrote plays. It was in 1919 that A. A. Milne had joined the Garrick Club. The club was to give him a great deal of pleasure (a refuge, another home, particularly in the thirties) – pleasure he would reward on his death with a share of the Pooh royalties. The Garrick was the appropriate club for a playwright. The Garrick was full of actors; it was full of writers too. Milne in 1919 was ambitious, and not just to make a lot of money. Towards the end of his life, he summed up his feelings like this: Of all the foolish things which Dr Johnson said, the most foolish was: 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' What he should have said was that a writer, having written what pleased him, was a blockhead if he did not sell it in the best market. But a writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence ... He yearns for the immortality, even if only in the British Museum, of s