Christopher Robin Milne died on April 20, 1996. He was the original Christopher Robin who owned the stuffed bear called Winnie-the-Pooh and his father A. A. Milne wrote some of the world's most famous children's books about his son and his toy animals. The obituaries for Christopher Milne stressed the fact that the "attention this brought him from Pooh fans didn't always sit well with the real Christopher Robin" ("Transition" 87). But in his autobiography, The Enchanted Places, which deals mainly with his childhood, Milne did not express any dislike for the books. The main problem that he had with his fame was that it was never really his own fame. The question that bothered him the most about the books was whether they had really been written for him, as his father sometimes claimed, or whether he was just the source of an idea that his father could use for his own purposes. In the book Milne tries to understand why it always seemed to him that his father had only pretended to write the books for him.
The book Milne wrote is not bitter toward his father. Instead it is very affectionate and proud. But if it is unusual enough to write an autobiography if a person is just the child of a famous man -- it is even more unusual to write an autobiography if a person is famous as a character in a book. Milne uses this book to come to terms with this very strange kind of fame and to explain to the world how he dealt with it and what it all meant to him.
The book was published in 1975 and the fact that it was written at all raises many questions about his reasons for writing it at that time. A. A. Milne had died in 1956, almost twenty years earlier. Milne was not, therefore, writing the book for his father's benefit. Nor was Milne writing the book because he had always wanted to be a writer. He had become a successful bookseller and was not interested in writing. Booksellers, he wrote, "don't often write books" because "th...