A. A. Milne grew up in a school but never intended to be a children's writer. He fought in the First World War, wrote some eighteen plays and three novels, and fathered a son, Christopher Robin Milne, in 1920. Christopher led Milne to produce a book of children's poetry, When We Were Very Young, in 1924, and in 1926 the seminal Winnie-the-Pooh. More poems followed in Now We Are Six (1927) and Pooh returned in The House at Pooh Corner (1928). E. H. Shepard famously illustrated both Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows though, like A. A. Milne, much of his career was devoted to work for the satirical magazine Punch. Shepard trained at the Royal Academy before going to fight in the First World War and winning the Military Cross. To illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh, Shepard observed the real Christopher Robin Milne, but not the real Pooh. The bear in the pictures is in fact based on Growler, a toy belonging to Shepard's own son.