Las Vegas Sun

April 24, 2024

Christopher Robin’ Milne dies at 75

The newspaper said he died on Saturday, but did not say where or give the cause of death.

Christopher Robin's fondness for a bear named Winnie at the London zoo became the basis for a series of hugely successful children's books -- "Winnie-the-Pooh" (1926), the verses "Now We are Six" (1927), and "The House at Pooh Corner" (1928). Disney later brought the stories to film.

Photographs revealed the many likenesses between the fictional Christopher Robin and the real child: the same wide, inquisitive brown eyes, the same carefully cropped mop top, the same gingham smock.

But as he grew up, Christopher Robin chafed at this melding of his real child and the fictional one in his father's tales.

Christopher Robin was born in London in 1920, and four years later, Alan Alexander Milne, already well-known for his light hand at literature and fiction, published a book of verse inspired by his son, "When We Were Very Young."

The grown Christopher Milne displayed a tendency to counter his father's wishes: he dropped out of Cambridge in 1939 to enlist in the army; he was wounded in Italy during World War II.

He married his cousin Lesley de Selincourt in 1949 -- again, not his father's choice for his bride -- and became a bookseller, settling in Stoke Fleming on England's southwestern coast.

His father died in 1956, and Christopher Robin said little about the effect of the series' immense popularity on his life until 1974, when he published "The Enchanted Places." That was followed by "The Path Through the Trees" in 1979 and "The Hollow on the Hill" in 1982.

Christopher Robin Milne is survived by his wife and daughter. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.

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