India, Oct. 16 -- Before Winnie-the-Pooh became the honey-loving bear with "very little brain", he was a stuffed toy in a little boy's nursery. And while his adventures offered children and their parents a gentle escape from the complexities of the real world, the man who wrote the enchanting stories lived a rather complicated life.

Born in London in 1882, Alan Alexander Milne was a Cambridge mathematician-turned writer (whose schoolteachers included HG Wells). The sharp-witted satirist worked, at one point, at the British magazine Punch, and was a playwright and World War 1 veteran, before he began to draw inspiration from his son Christopher Robin Milne's collection of toys to create the characters of the Hundred Acre Wood.

None of wh...