Hear the Classic Winnie-the-Pooh Read by Author A.A. Milne in 1929

Here’s a rare record­ing from 1929 of the British author A.A. Milne read­ing a chap­ter of his beloved chil­dren’s book, Win­nie-the-Pooh. Milne was a pro­lif­ic writer of plays, nov­els and essays, but he was most wide­ly known–much to his chagrin–as the cre­ator of a sim­ple and good-natured lit­tle bear.

Pooh was inspired by his son Christo­pher Robin’s favorite ted­dy bear. In Mil­ne’s imag­i­na­tion, the stuffed bear comes alive and enters into lit­tle adven­tures (or one might say mis­ad­ven­tures) with Christo­pher Robin and his oth­er stuffed ani­mals. The name “Win­nie” was bor­rowed from a famous res­i­dent of the Lon­don Zoo: a black bear from Cana­da named for the city of Win­nipeg. The young Christo­pher Robin liked vis­it­ing Win­nie at the zoo. He also liked a grace­ful swan he saw swim­ming in a pond at Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens, who he named “Pooh.” His father com­bined the two names to cre­ate one of the most pop­u­lar char­ac­ters in chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture.

Win­nie-the-Pooh first appeared in sto­ries and poems in pop­u­lar mag­a­zines. In 1926 Milne col­lect­ed them in a book, Win­nie-the-Pooh, with illus­tra­tions by E.H. Shep­ard. Each chap­ter in the book is a self-con­tained episode or sto­ry. In the record­ing below, Milne reads Chap­ter Three (click here to open the text in new a win­dow) “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunt­ing and Near­ly Catch a Woo­zle.”

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