Winnie-the-Pooh/Trivia


 * Creator Backlash: A.A. Milne grew to loathe his Winnie-the-Pooh books as it typecasted him forever as a "writer of children's books", and he could never go back to writing adult fiction. He even tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the second book. (Of course, it didn't work.) E.H. Shepard, Pooh's illustrator, also suffered from this as it overshadowed his work in political cartoons. Similarly, Milne's son, Christopher Robin, grew to hate the works as well for he was bullied constantly for being immortalized in them.
 * Defictionalization: The game of Poohsticks now has its own world championships.
 * What Could Have Been:
 * At one point, Gopher of the Disney adaptations would have been "in the book", according to Disney, who claimed that the real Christopher Robin saw a gopher in the garden and asked for it to be included in his father's stories. Fantasy author and animation historian John Grant, however, points out that gophers do not exist in Britain, and so this story is almost certainly false. Christopher Robin Milne's autobiography, The Enchanted Places, reveals that A. A. Milne had planned to include an American Gopher in his Pooh books, but his publisher nixed it (Enchanted Places reprints a short poem from the lost Milne version of Gopher). In other words, Gopher at one point would have been in the book.
 * In the introduction (or, according to Owl, the "Contradiction") to The House at Pooh Corner, Milne himself mentions other adventures, "more grand than any I have told you about", which he can't tell because they came to him in dreams and he's forgotten them. He only remembers one small part of one of them, with Pooh meeting 107 cows sitting on a gate, and claims that this was probably the best story of them all.
 * Write Who You Know: Christopher Robin is the author's son of the same name.