New York, Montclair and Greenwich · Early 1939
Four hundred drafts went out for comment. Back came a gentler tone, one changed word and a new member.
“Grennie, we aren’t alone any more.”
By late January 1939 the text and the stories were finished, and the money was nearly gone. Then someone, Bill W. couldn’t remember who, urged caution. The book might still hold medical errors, or something to offend their friends in religion. Why not try it out first, on the members and on everyone who had anything to do with drunks?
It would cost time and money they didn’t have, and many objected. But they made 400 mimeograph copies and sent them to everyone they could think of who might be concerned with alcoholism. Each was stamped “Loan Copy,” to protect the coming copyright.
Most came back, and the response was very good. A psychiatrist in Montclair, New Jersey, Dr. Howard, found the text too full of “you” and “must,” and its tone was softened throughout. Dr. Silkworth and Dr. Harry Tiebout gave similar advice. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the preacher, promised a review.
Nobody in the New York group was Catholic. Morgan R., the first Catholic to turn up there and only weeks out of Greystone asylum, knew a member of the Catholic Committee on Publications of the New York Archdiocese, and took them a copy. They sent back suggestions for the section on prayer, and asked for one real change, in Bill’s own story.
A copy also reached Blythewood, a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Dr. Tiebout gave it to a patient named Marty. The first reading made her rebellious; the second convinced her. She came to a meeting in Bill and Lois’s living room in Brooklyn, then went back to Blythewood with the news for a fellow patient.
It’s early 1939, at Blythewood, a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. Dr. Harry Tiebout hands one of his patients a thick mimeographed manuscript stamped Loan Copy. Her name is Marty.
It is one of four hundred copies the alcoholics have sent out for comment, to doctors, clergy and their own members. Most come back with suggestions. A psychiatrist finds it too full of you and must. A Catholic committee asks for one word to be changed.
Marty reads it, and rebels. She reads it again, and it convinces her. Soon she is at a meeting of alcoholics in a living room in Brooklyn.
Then she goes back to Blythewood and finds a fellow patient. “Grennie,” she says, “we aren’t alone any more.”
What came back
Three readers changed the book. The fourth didn’t change a word, and joined.
From Bill W.’s account in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957, written eighteen years later, and the Big Book itself.
Montclair, New Jersey
A psychiatrist. The text was too full of “you” and “must,” he said. Take out the coercion, and put it on a “we ought” basis.
Changed throughout. Bill argued weakly, then gave in.
The Steps chapter, in Keep Coming BackBill W., 1957
New York Archdiocese
Suggestions for the section on prayer, adopted on the spot, and one real change, asked with a smile: “we Catholics are promising folks something much better later on!”
Heaven became Utopia
Bill W., 1957; the Big Book, chapter 1
New York
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the preacher at Riverside Church, was pleased with the book and promised to review it when it came out.
He did, in the spring. It brought no orders.
7 · Twelve postcardsBill W., 1957
Greenwich, Connecticut
A patient at Blythewood sanitarium. She read the loan copy twice, came to a meeting in Brooklyn, and started meetings on the sanitarium’s grounds.
Some count it as AA’s third group
Bill W., 1957
Better safe than sorry
The loan copies cost time and money the book company didn’t have. They gave the book a gentler voice and word from the Archdiocese that it was all right, and they found it a member before it was printed.
For a closer look
Why they held the book back; two readers who got sober on it; and the marked-up manuscript that survives.
The money was nearly gone and they were ready to rush the book to press. The worry was medical errors, and anything that might offend clergy who could otherwise help.
The loan copies settled both. While they waited for the replies, two other fights broke out: over the title, told in First names only, and over the wording of the Steps, told in How It Works.
Marty was one of the first women to try AA. An earlier one, Florence R., had come in 1937; her story is in the first edition, and she later died of alcoholism.
With Dr. Tiebout and Blythewood’s owner, Mrs. Wylie, behind her, Marty started meetings on the sanitarium’s grounds early in 1939, so early that some think the Greenwich group should count as AA’s third. She went on to pioneer education about alcoholism. By 1955, Bill wrote, no woman in AA had been sober longer.
The other was a young man in California. Lois W. remembered that he had heard of AA through Dr. Silkworth, got hold of a loan copy and stayed sober alone for some time on the strength of it. Just before the book went to press he wrote to Bill, who was so excited by the first AA “loner” that he wired for permission to print the letter. It ran in the first edition as “The Lone Endeavor” and was dropped from later printings.
When the replies were in, Hank P. copied every correction by hand into one mimeograph for the printer (see 6 · Shoot what?).
Lois W. remembered three of the readers’ suggestions: “we” instead of “you,” the musts turned into suggestions, and the past tense changed to present. Bill, Hank and Ruth Hock “tussled greatly” over the changes. Then Tom U., a writer for Collier’s magazine whom Hank knew, sharpened the manuscript. She also remembered the loan copies differently: not mimeographs but Multilith copies, “a kind of offset,” in covers of red or blue cardboard.
A marked-up working copy of the manuscript survives. It sold at Sotheby’s in 2007, and Hazelden published it in facsimile in 2010 as The Book That Started It All. Many of its pages carry a dozen or more corrections, in several hands. One of them turns “You must find Him now!” into “May you find Him now!”
The same copy carries notes in Hank’s hand and an inscription by Lois dated January 1, 1978. Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, bought it in 2018. In July 2026 his estate sold it at Christie’s in New York for $2,393,000, to the Stepping Stones Foundation, which keeps Bill and Lois’s old home in Katonah, New York, and plans to show it there.