With the first publication of the children's book Winnie-the-Pooh on October 14, 1926, the world was introduced to some of the most popular fictional characters of the twentieth century — Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore. The second collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories, The House at Pooh Corner, appeared on bmookshelves just two years later and introduced the character Tigger. 1.
The author of the wonderful Winnie-the-Pooh stories, Milne found his inspiration for these stories in his son and his son's stuffed animals. The little boy who talks to the animals in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories is called Christopher Robin. 2. On August 21, 1921, the real-life Christopher Robin Milne received a stuffed bear for his first birthday, which he named Edward Bear. Although the real-life Christopher Robin loved his stuffed bear, he also fell in love with an A.merican black bear that he often visited at the London Zoo. 3. This bear was named “Winnie” which was short for “Winnipeg,” the hometown of the man who raised the bear as a cub and later brought the bear to the zoo. 4. As Milne states in the introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh, “Well, when Edward Bear said that he would like an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And so he was.” Thus, the name of the famous lazy bear in the stories became Winnie-the-Pooh, even though traditionally “Winnie” is a girl's name and Winnie-the-Pooh is definitely a boy bear. Many of the other characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories were also based on Christopher Robin's stuffed animals, including Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo. 5.