ey know only too well that there are already far too many" (168). Yet, he adds, when a bookseller does write a book he does so "because he feels he must: because the urge and the opportunity combine to say 'Now!'" (169). Aside from Milne's basic question about why the books had been written, he had several other reasons for writing his own book at that point in his life. First, he had achieved success of his own after years of dissatisfaction and living in his father's shadow. The second reason is that fifty years after they had been published it had become clear that these books were as popular as they had ever been. Third, Milne felt that he had to explain his own attitudes to those who believed that he was ungrateful or in some way unappreciative of his father;'s achievement. The final reason was that Milne wanted to offer the insights that only he possessed into the sources of books that had come to be seen as "imply and undeniably, great literature" (Deifendeifer 463).
Altogether A. A. Milne wrote four books that featured his son -- his only child -- who had been born in 1920. The first was the book of poems called When We Were Very Young (1924). This book was "spectacularly successful" and it was followed by the two volumes of Pooh stories, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and another book of poems called Now We Are Six (1927) (Eyre 21). At a time when the when "the general level of children's books was very low" Milne's works were the exception and achieved enormous popularity (Eyre 21). Christopher Robin Milne was central to the Pooh books and many of the poems in the other two books "feature or were spoken by Christopher Robin" as well (Deifendeifer 462). But, as Milne points out, "the Christopher Robin who appears i
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