Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic bear created by A. A. Milne.

The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and this was followed by The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Milne also included a poem about the bear in the childrens verse book When We Were Very Young (1924) and many more in Now We Are Six (1927). All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. (Hyphens in the character's name were dropped by Disney when the company adapted the Pooh stories into a series of features that became one of its most successful franchises.) The Pooh stories have been translated into many languages, including Alexander Lenard's Latin translation, Winnie ille Pu, which was first published in 1958, and, in 1960, became the only Latin book ever to have been featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. In popular film adaptations, Pooh Bear has been voiced by actors Sterling Holloway, Hal Smith and Jim Cummings in English, Yevgeny Leonov in Russian, and Shun Yashiro and Sukekiyo Kameyama in Japanese.

<<< an illustration by E.H.Shepard this first appeared in the When We Were Very Young (1924)

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the character Christopher Robin. Christopher's toys also lent their names to most of the other characters, except for Owl, Rabbit, and Gopher (added in the Disney version). Christopher Robin's toy bear is now on display at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library in New York City.

<<< Christopher Robin Milnes original toys where the characters originated from Christopher Milne had named his toy bear after Winnie, a Canadian black bear which he often saw at London Zoo, and "Pooh", a swan they had met while on holiday. Pooh the swan appears as a character in its own right in When We Were Very Young. In the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often called simply "Pooh": But his arms were so stiff ... they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think but I am not sure that that is why he is always called Pooh.

The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are set in Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England. According to Christopher Milne, while his father continued to live in London "...the four of ushe, his wife, his son and his son's nannywould pile into a large blue, chauffeur-driven Fiat and travel down every Saturday morning and back again every Monday afternoon. And we would spend a whole glorious month there in the spring and two months in the summer." From the front lawn the family had a view across a meadow to a line of alders that fringed the River Medway, beyond which the ground rose through more trees until finally "above them, in the faraway distance, crowning the view, was a bare hilltop. In the centre of this hilltop was a clump of pines." Most of his father's visits to the forest at this time were, he noted, family expeditions on foot "to make yet another attempt to count the pine trees on Gill's Lap or to search for the marsh gentian". Christopher added that, inspired by Ashdown Forest, his father had made it "the setting for two of his books, finishing the second little over three years after his arrival". Many locations in the stories can be linked to real places in and around the forest. As Christopher Milne wrote in his autobiography: Poohs forest and Ashdown Forest are identical. For example, the fictional "Hundred Acre Wood" was in reality Five Hundred Acre Wood; Galleon's Leap was inspired by the prominent hilltop of Gill's Lap, while a clump of trees just north of Gill's Lap became Christopher Robin's The Enchanted Place because no-one had ever been able to count whether there were sixty-three or sixty-four trees in the circle. Im sorry but counting up to 64 trees?? I think these people had too much time on their hands!