Illustration · A bedroom at night, with a tablet of scratch paper and a pencil on the blanket and the lamp still on. Drawn from Bill W.’s own description, not from a photograph.

182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn · December 1938

How It Works

Bill W. wrote the Twelve Steps in about half an hour, and the arguments over their wording went on until the book went to press.

“God was certainly there in our Steps, but He was now expressed in terms that anybody—anybody at all—could accept and try.”

Bill W., on the words his agnostic friends won · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

The backbone of the book

By December 1938 Bill W. had drafted four chapters of the book, and the New York members had argued over every one. The fifth had to say how the program actually worked. “The backbone of the book would have to be fitted in right here,” Bill wrote later.

One night, “sore and tired clear through,” he lay in bed at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn “with pencil in hand and with a tablet of scratch paper on my knee.” The members had been passing on six steps by word of mouth. Bill wanted more: “There must not be a single loophole through which the rationalizing alcoholic could wiggle out.” The draft “took perhaps half an hour.” When he numbered the steps, there were twelve.

Two late callers heard them first, his friend Howard A. and a newcomer. “You’ve got too much God in these steps,” they told him; “you will scare people away.”

The New York members split three ways. Fitz M., an Episcopal minister’s son from Maryland, wanted a Christian book. The largest group wanted God but no theology. The atheists and agnostics, led by Hank P. and backed by Jim B., at first wanted God out of the book altogether. Caught in the middle, Bill asked to be the final judge.

As Bill told it, the compromise came in Hank’s office in Newark: “a Power greater than ourselves” in Step Two, “God as we understood Him” in Steps Three and Eleven, no more “on our knees” in Step Seven, and a line calling the Steps “suggested.” The book came out in April 1939.

Listen How It Works About 1 minute

The loan copy, early 1939

“Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics…”

The book as printed

“…as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics…”

In the second printing, in 1941, “spiritual experience” became “spiritual awakening.” A new appendix explained that most awakenings were of the slow, “educational variety.”

Awakening since 1941

Suggestions only

Bill defended every word of his draft and lost several of them. He came to count the losses as gains. The atheists and agnostics, he wrote, had “widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Where “God as we understood Him” came from, how “you must” became “we,” and why there are twelve.

Where the words came from

Bill never knew who first proposed the compromise words: “Who first suggested the actual compromise words I do not know…”

The idea was older than the argument. In his own story in the 1939 book, Bill remembered Ebby T. across the kitchen table asking, “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” The chapter just before How It Works, “We Agnostics,” says it plainly: “When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God.”

Jim B., who called himself the members’ “first self-proclaimed atheist,” tied the change to his own fight when he looked back in 1968: “I do feel sure my experience was not in vain, for ‘God’ was broadened to cover all types and creeds: ‘God as we understood Him.’” He didn’t claim the words themselves.

We, not you

Among the readers of the loan copy was Dr. Howard, a psychiatrist in Montclair, New Jersey. As Bill recalled, he found the text “too full of the words ‘you’ and ‘must,’” and wanted it on “a ‘we ought’ basis instead of a ‘you must’ basis.” It meant reworking the whole text. Bill “argued weakly against it but soon gave in.”

The loan copy shows what changed. “You must find Him now!” became “May you find Him now!” “You may exclaim” became “Many of us exclaimed.”

The chapter still speaks to “you” in places. But mostly it tells what “we” did.

Why twelve?

By the fall of 1938 the members were telling newcomers a six-step program. Most of its ideas, Bill said, came from the Oxford Group, William James and Dr. Silkworth, by way of what Ebby had told him. Bill set out to break them into smaller pieces without knowing how many he would end with. “They added up to twelve. Somehow this number seemed significant.”

He admitted there was no plan behind it: “Without any special rhyme or reason I connected them with the twelve apostles.”

His first listeners weren’t impressed. “Why twelve steps?” Howard A. and his friend demanded.

The six steps, and the formula Ebby gave Bill at Towns Hospital, are in 4 · Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “Bill’s Story,” “We Agnostics” and “How It Works,” as reprinted in the fourth edition (AA World Services, 2001), with Appendix II, “Spiritual Experience,” first added in 1941.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. AA World Services, 1957. “When A.A. Came of Age” and “Service: The Third Legacy.”
“How It Works,” the prepublication text of 1939, as transcribed by the Anonymous Press.
The Book That Started It All: The Original Working Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous. Hazelden, 2010. A facsimile of an edited prepublication copy; see Kayleen Schaefer, “Alcoholics Anonymous: Original ‘Big Book’ Manuscript,” ABC News, September 23, 2010.
Jim B., “Sober for Thirty Years,” AA Grapevine, May 1968.
Tim Fitzpatrick, “The First Edition Big Book: A Printing-by-Printing History (1939–1954),” Recovery Collectibles, 2026. For the 1941 change to Step Twelve.