Genre: Anthologies, Essays & Short Works, Humorous Fiction, Single Author Collections
Chapter: 9
Listen: 1
A. A. Milne is best known for his creation of the perennially popular Winnie the Pooh, though he was and is highly acclaimed for hundreds of gently humorous essays and poems published in, among other famous venues, Punch Magazine, most of which have been collected and published as books. The Sunny Side is his last collection of articles and verses because, as he wrote in the American Introduction to the volume, “this sort of writing depends largely upon the irresponsibility and high spirits of youth for its success, and I want to stop before …the high spirits become mechanical …” He called this assortment “scrappy, because, “…Odd Verses have crept in on the unanswerable plea that, if they didn’t do it now, they never would; War Sketches protested that I shouldn’t have a book at all if I left them out; an Early Article, omitted from three previous volumes, paraded for the fourth time with such a pathetic ‘I suppose you don’t want me’ in its eye that it could not decently be rejected.” He concludes: “So here they all are.” Summary by Kirsten Wever