In some ways, the son of A. A. Milne (1882-1956) is more famous than the writer himself. After all, Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996) lent his name to the boy character who "owned" Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. Early in the first book, we read:

    "What about a story?" said Christopher Robin.

    "What about a story?" I said.

    "Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?"

    "I suppose I could," I said. "What sort of stories does he like?"

    "About himself. Because he's that sort of bear."

    The father, Alan Alexander Milne was a writer and former soldier who grew up in the home of his headmaster father and was early on exposed to greatness: the historian H. G. Wells taught in his father's school, and sometime in his youth, he played on a celebrity cricket team (founded by J. M. Barrie, author of "Peter Pan") with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes), Rudyard Kipling (who wrote "The Jungle Book," among many others), and G. K. Chesterton (whose many books include the Father Brown mysteries).

    Milne and his brother Kenneth wrote articles for the British magazine "Punch" under the penname "AKM" (Alan [&] Kenneth Milne), and eventually Alan became an assistant editor there. He wrote three novels and 18 plays before his son was born. In 1924, he published his first book of children's poems, which was eventually merged into the Winnie-the-Pooh books. The first collection of "Pooh" stories for children came out a year later. There are two books of stories--"Winnie-the-Pooh "(1926) and "The House at Pooh Corner" (1928)--and two books of poetry--"When We Were Very Young" (1924) and "Now We Are Six" (1927). All were illustrated by E. H. Shepard and are considered part of the "Winnie-the-Pooh" corpus.

    A fifth book, "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood," was written in 2009 by David Benedictus with permission of Milne's estate.

    Edward, the original stuffed bear who inspired the stories, now lives at the New York Public Library, along with his friends Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. They are visited by 750,000 people every year.

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. stories featuring a detective

    2. made up of famous people

    3. nicely, politely

    4. met famous people

    5. leader of a school

    6. joined, became part of

    7. people like

    8. people who inherit one's property, etc.

    9. when one is young

    10. body of work, collection of books

    ANSWERS: 1. mysteries 2. celebrity 3. sweetly 4. exposed to greatness 5. headmaster 6. merged 7. the likes of 8. estate 9. early on 10. corpus