SOURCE: "Milne's Pooh Books: The Benevolent Forest," in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Vol. 1, Children's Literature Association, 1985, pp. 163-71.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses the stories behind the books featuring Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, and contrasts the two characters.

For over half a century, Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin have been an inseparable literary pair. Ironically, Alan Alexander Milne had never intended to make his mark as a writer of children's literature, and was somewhat frustrated to find himself permanently typed as the author of poems and stories about a small boy and a Forest of personified animal-toys. When he began writing the verses for When We Were Very Young (1924), Milne had already achieved considerable success and popularity as a dramatist and novelist, although his humorous fantasy Once on a Time (1917) had not been very successful with either an adult or juvenile audience...