A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. One of his teachers was H. G. Wells who taught in a school where he went to study. 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.

He was the father of bookseller Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based.

Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. On 7 July 1916, he was injured in the Battle of the Somme and invalided back to England. Having recuperated, he was recruited into Military Intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI7 between 1916 and 1918. 

Milne did not speak out much on the subject of religion, although he used religious terms to explain his decision, while remaining a pacifist, to join the British Home Guard: "In fighting Hitler," he wrote, "we are truly fighting the Devil, the Anti-Christ ... Hitler was a crusader against God."

Milne married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt (1890–1971) in 1913 and their son Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920. In 1925, Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex.

Milne did not speak out much on the subject of religion, although he used religious terms to explain his decision, while remaining a pacifist, to join the British Home Guard: "In fighting Hitler," he wrote, "we are truly fighting the Devil, the Anti-Christ ... Hitler was a crusader against God."

A. A. Milne died on January 31, 1956, aged 74. After a memorial service in London, his ashes were scattered in a crematorium's memorial garden in Brighton.