Bedford Hills, New York · 1951–1953
In a studio in the woods, through a long depression, Bill W. wrote a second book about the Twelve Steps, and didn’t change a word of them.
“We have to deal with atheists, agnostics, believers, depressives, paranoids, clergymen, psychiatrists, and all and sundry.”
When the Big Book came out in April 1939, AA had about a hundred sober members. By 1953, the new book’s foreword said, AA had “more than one hundred thousand” members. The Twelve Steps in the book’s fifth chapter hadn’t changed since 1941 (How It Works, in Keep Coming Back, tells that change). After AA adopted its Traditions in 1950, Lois W. wrote, members were asking for a book that covered both.
Bill W. wrote it at home. Among the trees near Stepping Stones, the house in Bedford Hills, New York, where he and Lois lived, he and a friend had put up a studio of cement block, and he called it Wit’s End. Lois remembered it as newly finished, and said it gave him “the seclusion he needed.” He began right after AA’s first General Service Conference, in April 1951, by Pass It On’s account, or in early 1952, by his own. He was depressed almost the whole time (The quarter mile, in Number One Man, tells that story).
He wrote the Traditions essays first. The Steps were another matter: writing them had been one thing, Pass It On says, and explaining them to every kind of alcoholic quite another. On July 17, 1952, he wrote to Father Edward Dowling, the Jesuit who had become his friend: “The problem of the Steps has been to broaden and deepen them, both for newcomers and oldtimers.” He wanted, as he put it, to “widen the opening so it seems right and reasonable to enter there.”
He left the Steps themselves alone. What had changed was who needed them explained. The 1939 book, the new one said, had “dealt with low-bottom cases only.” Since then AA had drawn people who still had “their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage.” Bill wrote an essay on each Step, for newcomers and oldtimers alike: what it asked of a sober alcoholic, and what got in the way.
He circulated drafts, piece by piece, to friends and editors (Rule 62’s Legacy tells what Jack Alexander of the Saturday Evening Post made of them). Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions came out in 1953. Bill had expected it to interest mainly oldtimers. By October he found it “being used to good effect even upon newcomers.” Members still call it the Twelve and Twelve.
It’s 1952, at Stepping Stones in Bedford Hills, New York, in the little cement-block studio Bill W. calls Wit’s End.
He’s writing a second book about the Twelve Steps. The first, the Big Book, came out in 1939, when AA had about a hundred sober members. Now there are more than a hundred thousand, and many of them never sank as low as the first members had.
Bill is depressed, and the Steps are hard to explain. He writes to a friend that he has to reach every kind of reader, from believers to atheists, from clergymen to psychiatrists.
He doesn’t change a word of the Steps. Instead he writes an essay on each one, about what it asks of an alcoholic who has stopped drinking.
The book comes out in 1953: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Members still call it the Twelve and Twelve.
Same Steps, second book
The Big Book’s chapters on belief and the Steps, written in 1938, beside Bill’s essays of 1953: five places where they part ways, then the words each one leans on.
Big Book wording from the 1939 text; Twelve and Twelve wording from the current printing. The counts are ours.
The Big Book, 1939
“God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?”
From “We Agnostics,” the chapter before the Steps, written to the reader who doubts.
Twelve and Twelve, 1953
“You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your ‘higher power.’”
A sponsor, talking to a newcomer who won’t believe, in the essay on Step Two.
The Big Book, 1939
“This is our twelfth suggestion: Carry this message to other alcoholics!”
From the first paragraph of “Working with Others,” the chapter on Twelfth Step work.
The Big Book gives the Steps three chapters, about 13,000 words. Bill’s essays on them run about 29,000.
The Big Book, 1939“How It Works,” “Into Action” and “Working with Others”
13,000
Twelve and Twelve, 1953The twelve essays on the Steps
29,000
The essays run more than twice as long, so the bars below show how often each word comes up per 10,000 words. Any ending counts: instinct and instincts, pride and prideful, resentment and resentful.
emotion, emotional2 times in 1939; 50 in 1953
humilityonce in 1939; 42 times in 1953
instinctnever in 1939; 34 times in 1953
pride2 times in 1939; 23 in 1953
sponsornever in 1939; 17 times in 1953
resentment15 times in 1939; 7 in 1953
“God” comes up at about the same rate in both: 43 and 49 times per 10,000 words. Counted by us in the 1939 text of chapters 5 to 7 and the current printing of the Step essays, leaving out footnotes added since.
Same words, longer talk
Apart from the one word changed in 1941, the Steps read the same in both books. In 1953 Bill gave them more than twice the words, and many of the new ones are about living sober: pride, humility, the instincts, the emotions.
For a closer look
Where the studio was and when it went up; whether the essays ran in the Grapevine first; and the case for leaving the Steps alone.
Pass It On puts the studio in the woods near Stepping Stones: small, cement block, built by Bill and a friend. Lois W. put it “on a knoll beyond the house,” built by Bill “and another A.A.” Neither book dates it. Pass It On mentions it at the start of a chapter on the mid-1940s. Lois tells of it twice, once among their early work on the house and once as “recently finished” when he started the book.
They don’t agree on the name either: Wit’s End in Lois’s book and under a photograph in Pass It On, Wits’ End in Pass It On’s text. In 1957 Bill’s own history printed a photograph of the desk he worked at, in what the caption called “the shack.”
In 1960 he wrote that from his workshop he could see, across the valley, the building where his home group met.
Lois W. wrote in 1979 that the book “was first published as a series in the A.A. Grapevine during 1952 and 1953.” The editors of Bill’s collected Grapevine writings, in 1988, mention only a series on the Traditions, “written in 1952 and 1953 and later reprinted” in the book; the Grapevine’s own archive has “Tradition One” in its April 1952 issue. Their collection says it brings together “virtually every article” Bill wrote for the Grapevine, and it has no essays on the Steps, which tells against Lois’s memory. These sources don’t settle it.
The book’s copyright, shared with AA Grapevine, Inc., begins in 1952. Its own copyright page gives the first printing as April 1953; the list of dates in today’s printing of AA Comes of Age says June.
In the Grapevine in September 1948, Dr. Bob S. wrote that the Steps were simple enough that “no special interpretations, and certainly no reservations, have ever been necessary.” He died in November 1950, before Bill began, and no source records what he thought of a book of essays on them.
Bill’s book set out “to broaden and deepen the understanding of the Twelve Steps,” and left their wording as it was.
The one change the Steps had seen, “spiritual experience” to “spiritual awakening” in Step Twelve in a 1941 printing, still pained Father Dowling in 1955. At AA’s convention in St. Louis that July he said: “I still weep that the elders of the movement have dropped the word ‘experience’ for ‘awakening.’” (How It Works tells the change).