Who wrote the original Winnie the Pooh stories?

A. A. Milne wrote the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, poet, playwright, and former army officer whose children’s books made him internationally famous. His first major collection of Pooh stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, was published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. E. H. Shepard provided the illustrations for both books.

Milne drew inspiration from his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and from the child’s collection of stuffed animals. The real toys supplied models for characters such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger. Christopher Robin himself became a character in the stories, while Rabbit and Owl were created from Milne’s imagination.

A frequent confusion is attributing the books to Walt Disney. Disney adapted and popularized Pooh for film and television beginning in the 1960s, but Disney did not write the original literary stories. Milne’s manuscripts are preserved at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, his university. His earlier career as a playwright was largely overshadowed by the worldwide success of the Pooh books.