A. A. Milne

Milne was an assistant editor at Punch and a successful playwright before the bear, and he spent the remainder of his life mildly resenting what the bear did to that reputation. Winnie-the-Pooh appeared in 1926 and The House at Pooh Corner in 1928, both drawn by E. H. Shepard, whose illustrations are now inseparable from the text; the animals were his son Christopher Robin's toys, and the boy grew up to write with some bitterness about having been turned into a character. The Red House Mystery, from 1922, is a country-house detective novel that Raymond Chandler later took apart at length as a specimen of the form's implausibility, a strange afterlife for a book its author was proud of. Milne served on the Somme, published a pacifist tract called Peace with Honour in 1934, and issued a partial retraction five years later when the argument stopped holding. He wrote for adults for another twenty years and almost nobody noticed.