Marcia Dalphin, "Mr. Edward Bear, His Book," in New York Herald Tribune Books, October 17, 1926, p. 8:
"Writers for children have done stories about bears often enough, but it has remained for Milne to discover to us in Winnie-the-Pooh the essential wistfulness of these great lumbering, blundering creatures. Others have shown their clumsiness, their heavy, halting intelligence, their occasional flashes of sly humor, their greediness. Pooh has all of these; but he has something else as well--a disarming humility in the presence of his quicker-witted fellows, a longing for approval, a desire to be correct (did he not take Stoutness Exercises in front of the glass?), a--well, there's no word for it but wistfulness--that goes straight to your heart...
As you read the conviction grows on you that Mr. Milne has done it again. There are not so very many books that, sitting reading all alone, you find yourself laughing aloud over. This is one of them. Here is nonsense in the best tradition; entirely plausible on the surface, as true nonsense always is, with good sense at its core, and the high seriousness about it that children and other wise people love. The illusion is perfect. You never forget that these are nursery animals, and that you exist as a reader only because you are allowed to see them through the eyes of a loving little child. Who could have done it except [A.A. Milne]?"
Margery Williams Bianco, in a review of "Winnie-the-Pooh," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 3, No. 15, November 6, 1926, pp. 277-278:
"Winnie-the-Pooh is a joy; full of solemn idiocies and the sort of jokes one weeps over helplessly, not even knowing why they are so funny, and with it all the real wit and tenderness which alone could create such a priceless little masterpiece. Kanga and baby Roo, Piglet, and above all Pooh and Christopher Robin himself, are characters no one can afford to miss. It is even better than When We Were Very Young, which is saying much."
The Nation and Athenaeum, P.I., in a review of "Winnie-the-Pooh," in The Nation and Athenaeum, Vol. XL, No. 9, December 4, 1926, pp. 355-356:
As soon as I brought home Winnie-the-Pooh,...the children seized it, and, ever since, they have been reading it, learning it by heart, quarreling over it, and loving it. So far as I can judge, from the hurried glimpses they have allowed me, it is a real children's book, in the direct line of succession to Alice in Wonderland, Uncle Remus, and The Wind in the Willows, and worthy to rank with those immortal works. It is the gift book of the year."
