Bill W. took his first drink at age 21, and changed his life forever. Seventeen years later, in 1934, Wilson’s drinking had ruined his career, damaged his health, and caused agonizing pain and worry to his family and friends.

But Wilson found a way out. He co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous, one of history’s most important social movements.

William Griffith Wilson was born on December 26, 1895, in East Dorset, Vermont, the older of two children of Gilman Wilson, a marble quarry foreman, and Emily Griffith Wilson. Gilman was a heavy drinker, and Bill speculated in later years that this led to his parents’ divorce when he was still a boy. Watching his father’s battle with liquor, Bill grew up afraid of the stuff and never touched it, according to several sources.

Young Bill was in many ways a high achiever, driven to succeed. His motivation seems to have been in part a certain psychological emptiness: “I had to be first in everything,” he later recalled, “because in my perverse heart, I felt myself the least of God’s creatures.”

As he grew up, he became prone to depression, physical tension, intense social awkwardness, and a fear that he was merely passing through life. At the same time, however, he was smart, ambitious, and seemed headed for worldly success. In 1917, as America prepared to enter World War I, he volunteered for the Army as an officer candidate. One night, Second Lieutenant Wilson attended a party in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and took what several biographers say was his first serious adult drink. Suddenly, magically, he felt released from the tensions that had plagued him for so long. Recalling the moment years later, he made it sound like a religious experience: “Lo, the miracle! …    I belonged to the universe; I was a part of things at last.”

Bill Wilson got plastered that night and soon began indulging in drinking bouts that ended with vomiting and passing out. His army buddies didn’t worry much about his boozing; neither did his fiancé, Lois Burnham, who believed she could change him back into a teetotaler after their marriage. They wed in early 1918, but Bill kept drinking. In July, he sailed for Europe, where he performed well as an Army office while discovering the joys of French wine.

Back in the States after the war, he earned good money in different Wall Street investment jobs, and after work each day, made the rounds of the speakeasies, searching for that elusive feeling of exhilaration. He knew he had a drinking problem. He tried to quit many times. In those days, alcoholism was viewed as a weakness rather than a disease, and the accepted wisdom was that one could stop drinking if they summoned adequate willpower.

Wilson’s troubles deepened in 1929 when the stock market crashed and the nation entered into a depression. His income shrank, his ego took a beating, and his drinking increased. He lost his job, spent days in blackouts, got into fights, and hid at home with a bottle of gin. By late 1934, he was scraping the bottom of the emotional barrel.

A complex series of events followed that gradually helped him find a way out of his misery:

• An old drinking buddy, Ebby Thatcher, visited Bill at the Wilson residence in Brooklyn, New York, in November 1934. When Bill offered Ebby a snort, he was stunned when Ebby replied in the negative. Ebby had found religion, was sober, and was interested in helping Bill get sober, too. Wilson was leery, but Ebby’s visit showed him the value of one alcoholic talking to another about recovery, and gave Bill a sliver of solace and hope.
• In December, hospitalized after a bender, Wilson prayed. He was amazed when an intense spiritual experience followed: A “great white light” spread throughout his room and a feeling of peace came over him. Some observers dismiss this as the result of toxic psychosis, but regardless of the medical explanation, SOMETHING important happened.
• A short while later, still in the hospital, Wilson read The Varieties of Religious Experience, a 1902 book by philosopher and psychologist William James. Wilson concluded that a spiritual experience did not necessarily have to come from traditional religious channels; one could still embrace it and use it to generate robust changes in one’s life.
• Another influence in the evolution of Wilson’s thinking was the Oxford Group, the Christian evangelical body to which Ebby Thatcher belonged. The group practiced such ideas as surrender to a higher power, confession before fellow members, absolute honesty, and unselfish service to others.

Wilson was released from the hospital on December 18, 1934. He was 39 years old, and he never took another drink. He had found his life’s purpose – helping people get and stay sober by using the tools he’d recently discovered. He went to work with the tremendous unlocked energy of a man who had set aside his ego and his dreams of personal glory.

One more event was key to the formation of AA. While in Akron, Ohio, in May of 1935, through a series of coincidences, Bill met an alcoholic physician named Bob Smith. Their 6-hour meeting confirmed to Wilson the extraordinary value of one alcoholic telling his story to another honestly, without “preachiness” or condescension. Wilson not only helped Smith; he helped himself. Smith stopped drinking, and the two men became brothers in spirit. Working together, they pooled their knowledge about liquor and healing, and formed what would become Alcoholics Anonymous.

At first, AA was a tiny fellowship of spiritual explorers “groping in the dark,” as one member put it, for a simple, effective way to create a satisfying life without alcohol. Slowly, the organization caught on. Press coverage helped, as did the 1939 publication of Wilson’s book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which presented the Twelve Steps – a cornerstone of AA and one of the most significant spiritual/therapeutic concepts ever created. Wilson wrote the first draft of the Twelve Steps in bed one night; AA members helped refine the approach. Among the steps: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable,” and “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and direction of God as we understood Him.”

The book became AA’s primary text, and eventually it gave Bill and Lois a comfortable income. They lived the rest of their lives in Bedford Hills, New York, just outside New York City, with Bill working full time as leader of AA and Lois helping to found Al-Anon, an organization for families of alcoholics.

As AA grew, Bill continued to seek deeper truths about human existence. He read voraciously, saw a therapist, studied Roman Catholicism but never joined any church, shocked the AA board of trustees by experimenting with LSD, and conducted séances in his home. He developed a strong interest in vitamin therapy for alcoholism and mental/emotional problems.

The childless Wilson marriage lasted 53 years, until Bill’s death from emphysema in Miami in 1971 at age 75. Lois lived until 1988. She was loyal to Bill through thick and thin, and the thin moments were legion – not only Wilson’s drinking in the early days, but his probable womanizing in later years.

Bill Wilson survived tremendous hardship and emerged a better man. As is the case in many remarkable lives, his suffering put him on the path to greatness. Restless soul that he was, he surely knew how much work still needed to be done, how many people still needed help through AA’s basic formula: “Don’t drink, one day at a time. Go to meetings.”

Membership in AA has grown and grown, and today stands at 1.1 million people in the United States, and 2.2 million more in over 150 countries around the world.

Taken from Biography Magazine January 2003 issue,

from an article entitled “Clean and Sober” by Bob Frost