Bill W., Co-Founder of AA

Although Alcoholics Anonymous traces its beginning to Akron, Ohio, in 1935, one of the two co-founders was Bill Wilson, a New York stockbroker. Alcoholism had cost him his career and forced him and his wife to move into her childhood home in Brooklyn. After he had made several unsuccessful attempts to kick the habit, something suddenly clicked. Now sober, Bill W., as he is generally known in AA circles (or sometimes just Bill), met in Akron with a surgeon who also was struggling with alcoholism. Bill helped the surgeon give up alcohol, and the two worked together with other alcoholics in Akron, marking the beginning of AA.

[This is an AI generated photo. It is not meant to be any particular person.]

Soon afterward, Bill W. invited New Yorkers struggling with alcohol addiction to meet in his Brooklyn home. The meetings were so helpful that he decided to write a book to guide people who could not attend. Called The Big Book, it explained the twelve steps to recovery and presented the stories of dozens of people who had become sober through AA. Since updated several times, the original 1939 edition (still available) is the work of a New Yorker, Bill W.

The Newark office where Bill W. wrote the book quickly became too small for the growing organization. In March 1940, AA opened its first national headquarters in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan—in the same area where Bill had once worked as a stockbroker. Investing in people through the work he was now doing with alcoholics, he realized, was much more important than investing in stocks.