Bill Wilson

Wilson was born on 26 November 1895 in East Dorset, Vermont to Gilman Barrows Wilson and Emily Griffith. After a troubled childhood, he became an alcoholic at age 22. In the 1920s he was one of the first stock analysts and became quite rich until the market crashed, mainly as a result of the insider trading schemes that he was involved with himself.

One day, an old drinking friend named Ebby Thatcher arranged a visit to the Wilson house. Expecting to spend a day drinking and re-living old times Wilson was instead shocked by Thatcher's refusal to drink. "I've got religion" he reportedly said to Wilson's surprise. Thatcher had recently joined a Christian fellowship known as the Oxford Group. The Oxford Group admonished alcoholics to achieve victory over drinking by performing various tasks such as making amends, acting as a witness to God's grace, admission of personal defeat, among others.

Wilson declined this invitation to sobriety. However, later while in a hospital recuperating from a drinking bout he had a religious vision (later described as a "spiritual experience"). His obsession to drink vanished at once. It is believed that Wilson connected his spontaneous release from alcoholism to the recent visit by Thatcher. This in turn inspired Wilson to seek out and bring the message of his recovery to others as Thatcher had done for him.

Wilson joined the Oxford Movement, with a personal focus on helping alcoholic prospects. He had little success for the first six months of doing so. Then he made a trip to Akron, Ohio for a business deal. The transaction failed and in a state of frustration he was tempted to drink again. Instead he camped in a phone booth at the his hotel and dialed up clergy from a church directory. He had concluded his only hope to avoid drinking was to locate a fellow problem drinker to speak with, so he made these calls looking for one. This led him to a meeting with a reluctant local surgeon named Dr. Bob Smith. This would prove to be the start of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the date, June 10th 1935, is regarded as the date of origin for the fellowship.

In 1939, after some success in Akron and New York, Wilson decided to write a book that described their ideas of alcoholic recovery. In the fifth chapter, he explained "how it works" and documented the twelve steps on paper. The ideas of the steps were expansions and alterations on six concepts from the Oxford Group but tailored more specifically to alcoholism. After grappling for a proper title for the book, the title "Alcoholics Anonymous" was selected, and the movement took the same name.

There was very little success with the book at first. Then in 1941 the Saturday Evening Post dispatched a reporter to investigate this rumored group of alcoholics talking about a recovery plan. The resulting article proved to be the spark that ignited nationwide growth of the movement.

In the 1940s, Wilson learned about a long forgotten fellowship of reformed drunks that came into being in the 1800s. That fellowship was called The Washingtonians. The fact that a similar movement to A.A. had once existed, and faded into obscurity, had worrisome implications for the future of A.A. It is theorized that the Washingtonians fell apart because they lost focus by branching out beyond their initial scope of alcoholic recovery into various issues of the day. Fearful of a similar fate, among other reasons, Wilson began promoting the idea that a basic set of guidelines be established defining what A.A. was and was not. This resulted in the "Twelve Traditions" that complement the twelve steps. These traditions spell out A.A. as an organization that does not issue public opinions, support or oppose causes, impose membership requirements beyond a desire for sobriety, admonishes members to remain anonymous at the public level and so on.

Wilson refused numerous honors during his life, including an honorary degree from Yale University, and refused to allow himself to be on the covers of magazines. Before the twelve traditions were in place, Wilson was not shy about personal publicity. He later became an anonymous member and would later state that the principle of "public anonymity" was the greatest "spiritual principle" advanced by A.A. Even so, some say he would at times pace his office complaining that he had done so much for alcoholics and not gotten enough credit for it.

Wilson suffered long bouts of depression before and after sobriety and engaged in psychiatric therapy. At Trabuco College in California, he became friends with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, the founder of the College. In the 1950s, Wilson and Heard experimented with LSD, a potent psychedelic theorized to have the potential to help alcoholics and drug addicts stop their cycles of abuse. These claims have been substantiated, but, due to the fact that LSD was scheduled by the DEA on October 27, 1970, as a Schedule I drug, they have not been investigated further. Wilson later claimed that this was the peak spiritual experience of his life.

A lifelong smoker, Wilson died of emphysema and pneumonia on 24 January 1971 in Miami, Florida. Susan Cheever's biography of Wilson documented the fact that he repeatedly begged his caregivers for alcohol in the last days of his life.

The phrase "Friends of Bill W." is sometimes a code for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill Wilson's story and his eventual founding of AA was dramatized in the 1989 TV movie My Name is Bill W., starring James Woods and James Garner.