A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh was published in London on October 14, 1926, with drawings by E. H. Shepard, and it has never been out of print since. The stories were written for Milne's son, Christopher Robin, who appears in them by his own name, and the bear was named for a real animal, a black bear called Winnipeg that lived at London Zoo, and for a swan the boy had called Pooh. The hundred-acre wood in the book was the forest near the family's house in Sussex.
Milne was not a children's writer. He was a playwright and a humorist for Punch, and he had fought in the First World War, and the children's books came late, almost as an aside, from poems he had started writing for the boy. The first of them, When We Were Very Young, came out in 1924, and the Pooh book followed, and both were hits from the first week, which surprised him as much as anyone.
The success became a burden on the family. Christopher Robin grew up and came to dislike being the boy in the book, and Milne came to dislike being known only for a bear, and in the end the stories were sold off, and the films and the merchandise that followed made a fortune for other people. The book itself is a small thing, ten stories, most of them about nothing much, a bear trying to reach honey and a piglet afraid of everything.
It has lasted because of the tone and the drawings. The jokes are deadpan and the animals are described with the seriousness of adults, and Shepard's ink line fixed the look of the characters so firmly that no film since has been able to move far from it. Milne wrote two Pooh books and a handful of poems, and on the strength of them the bear is one of the most recognised fictional characters in the world.