I pretty much grew up with Winnie the Pooh. I loved him, and I loved everybody around him: Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga and Roo, and Christopher Robin keeping an eye on all of them. The Hundred Acre Wood was an enchanting place for a kid to spend time, and the way I remember it, a lot of that time came on Saturday mornings in front of the television.
On October 14, 2026, that bear turned 100. Winnie-the-Pooh, the book, was published in London on October 14, 1926, and the stuffed bear of very little brain has been with us ever since.
A hundred years is a long time for anything to stay loved. Most children’s characters from the 1920s are forgotten now, and their books are out of print. Pooh outsold, outlasted and outlived nearly all of them, and he’s still on lunchboxes, bookshelves and screens. So his birthday deserves a proper look.
When was Winnie-the-Pooh first published?
Methuen published Winnie-the-Pooh in London on October 14, 1926, with illustrations by E. H. Shepard. In the United States, E. P. Dutton published it the same month, and McClelland and Stewart brought it out in Canada.
The bear wasn’t brand new, though. He’d shown up twice before.
His first appearance was in a poem called “Teddy Bear” in Punch magazine on February 13, 1924, where he was called Edward Bear. The poem went into Milne’s book of children’s verse, When We Were Very Young, that November. The first story with Winnie-the-Pooh by name ran in the London Evening News on Christmas Eve, 1925.
So you can argue for a few different birthdays. The one that counts for most people is the book, and the book is 100.
Milne followed it with a second poetry collection, Now We Are Six, in 1927, and a second story collection, The House at Pooh Corner, in 1928. Those two story books are the whole canon. Milne wrote only two volumes of Pooh stories, and they’ve been enough for a century.
A hundred years of Winnie-the-Pooh, from a poem in Punch to the 2026 centenary.
Where did the name Winnie-the-Pooh come from?
From a real bear and a swan.
In 1921 Milne bought a teddy bear at Harrods for his son, Christopher Robin Milne. The boy called it Edward at first, then renamed it after Winnie, a black bear at the London Zoo who was a favorite of his.
Winnie had a story of her own. During the First World War, a Canadian army veterinarian named Lieutenant Harry Colebourn bought a bear cub for twenty dollars at a train stop in White River, Ontario. He named her after his hometown, Winnipeg. When his unit shipped out for the front, he left her at the London Zoo, where she became one of its best-loved animals.
The “Pooh” came from a swan the family met on holiday.
Most of the rest of the cast came from Christopher Robin’s nursery. Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger were all real toys. Owl and Rabbit were Milne’s inventions. The surviving original toys, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger, came to the United States in 1947 and have been at the New York Public Library since 1987.
Poor Roo was lost long ago.
A boy’s toys, a father who wrote them down, and a bear named for a soldier’s hometown. That’s how a century starts.
Why are the Winnie-the-Pooh characters still loved after 100 years?
Because every one of them is somebody you know.
Pooh is the friend who isn’t clever but is always kind, and who’d walk across the whole forest for a pot of honey or for you. Piglet is small and scared and brave anyway. Eeyore is the gloomy one whose friends keep showing up for him, even when he insists nobody remembers his birthday. Tigger bounces into every room and never once considers that the bouncing might be a problem. Rabbit organizes everything whether anybody asked or not. Owl knows less than he thinks he does.
Milne drew all of them with the plainest words he could find, and plain words are what last. I wrote about that simplicity on Winnie the Pooh Day, Milne’s birthday in January, and I still think he’d embarrass most prize-winning novelists on pure craft.
There’s also something gentle about the Hundred Acre Wood that’s rare now. Nobody’s a villain. The biggest dangers are a flood, a stuck bear and a Heffalump that never quite shows up. The stories are about friends taking care of each other. Kids feel safe there. So do a lot of grown-ups, and plenty of them reread the books long after their own kids have outgrown them.
Winnie-the-Pooh turned 100 on October 14, 2026. A boy’s toys, a father who wrote them down, and a century of kids who grew up in the Hundred Acre Wood. – Richard LoweShare on X
How did Disney get Winnie the Pooh?
Through a licensing deal that’s older than most people realize.
In January 1930, an American producer and agent named Stephen Slesinger bought the American and Canadian merchandising rights from Milne. Within two years, Pooh merchandise had turned into a big business. In 1961, Walt Disney licensed film and other rights from Milne’s estate and from Slesinger’s company, and everything most of us picture when we hear the name came after that: the red shirt, Sterling Holloway’s voice and the narrator turning the pages of the storybook.
Disney started with three short films. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree came out in 1966. Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day followed in 1968 and won the Academy Award for best animated short. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too arrived in 1974. In 1977 Disney stitched the three together into The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and a generation of kids, me included, fell for that version of the bear.
Television kept him close after that. Welcome to Pooh Corner ran on the Disney Channel starting in 1983, and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh ran on ABC from 1988 to 1991, right in the Saturday morning cartoon block.
The live-action films came much later. Goodbye Christopher Robin, in 2017, told the true story of Milne and his son, and how the fame of the books weighed on the real boy.
The real Christopher Robin Milne had a hard time with it. He was teased at school about the books, and he spent years resenting the fame they brought him. As a grown man he ran a bookshop in Dartmouth, in the south of England, and he eventually made his peace with the bear, writing his own memoirs about growing up as the boy in the stories.
Christopher Robin, in 2018, put Ewan McGregor in the role as a grown man who’d forgotten how to have fun, and brought the toys to life to remind him.
How popular is Winnie the Pooh?
Bigger than almost anything else in children’s literature.
Want a strange one? In 1960 a Latin translation, Winnie ille Pu, made The New York Times best seller list. It’s still the only book in Latin that ever did. Somebody figured out that parents and teachers would buy a familiar bear to make Latin go down easier, and they were right.
The money got enormous. In 2002 Forbes ranked Pooh the most valuable fictional character in the world, with merchandise bringing in more than $5.9 billion that year. Only Mickey Mouse made Disney more.
And the book has never lost its place with readers. When the BBC asked the British public to pick the nation’s best-loved novel in 2003, Winnie-the-Pooh came in seventh, ahead of an awful lot of serious literature.
Not bad for a teddy bear from a department store.
Is Winnie-the-Pooh in the public domain?
The original 1926 book is, in the United States. Its copyright expired on January 1, 2022, and The House at Pooh Corner, with Tigger, followed on January 1, 2024.
That means anyone can use Milne’s text and Shepard’s original drawings of those characters. It doesn’t free the Disney versions. The red shirt, the Disney designs and everything Disney added still belong to Disney, and its trademark rights still apply.
The first thing somebody did with the freedom was make a slasher movie. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey came out in 2023, with Pooh and Piglet as killers. It was cheap, it got terrible reviews, and it made money anyway. It’s about as far from the Hundred Acre Wood as you can get, and I suspect Milne would have found it baffling. But it’s what public domain means. Once a story belongs to everybody, everybody gets to decide what to do with it.
How is Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100th birthday being celebrated?
Disney turned the centenary into a yearlong celebration, with new books, collector plush, clothing lines and new episodes of a Disney Jr. series called Playdate with Winnie the Pooh. Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic put out anniversary editions and treasuries, and libraries and bookstores held birthday readings and parties.
Want to celebrate? The best way to mark it costs nothing.
Read the original book. Read it to a kid, or read it by yourself. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s still the gentlest place in children’s literature.
My take
I grew up with Pooh and every one of his friends, and the Hundred Acre Wood was an enchanting place to be a kid. A century later, Milne’s two little story books still work for the same reason they did in 1926: plain words, real characters and friends who look out for each other. Happy 100th, bear. Go read the book again.
A bear of very little brain, a hundred years on
A father wrote down the games his son played with a stuffed bear from Harrods. He named the bear after a soldier’s cub at the zoo and a swan on a pond, and he kept the words so simple a child could hear them once and remember them. A hundred years later, that bear is still on bookshelves, screens and pajamas, and kids are still meeting him for the first time.
There are more literary days worth celebrating on the Literary Holidays Calendar, including Alice’s Day and International Children’s Book Day. If you’ve got a children’s story of your own you’ve been telling out loud for years, my writing services can help you get it onto the page.