The definitive biography of Bill Wilson, the man who established Alcoholics Anonymous, and the first to be written with access to documents in that organization's archives, by a noted author who is herself a recovering alcoholic. In this definitive and groundbreaking biography, acclaimed author Susan Cheever offers a remarkably human portrait of a man whose life and work both influenced and saved the lives of millions of people. Drawing from personal letters, diaries, AA archives, interviews—and Cheever's own experiences with alcoholism —My Name Is Bill is the first fully documented, deeply felt account of Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous. "Distinctive...and telling." -- The New York Times Book Review "Susan Cheever...decants the ups and downs of a remarkable man [and] does so in her distinctive style: succinct chapters, pithy profiles and telling detail...even more important are the insights and empathy so credibly her own as a reformed drinker who attended meetings of AA with her father, novelist John Cheever." -- The New York Times Book Review "As the biography of one of the most humane and beneficial Americans who ever lived, it is a national treasure." -- Kurt Vonnegut "[A] wise, well-reported life story of the man who changed the way the world deals with addiction." -- Chicago Sun-Times Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family. Chapter One: The Wilson House The evening before Thanksgiving on November 25, 1895, Mrs. Emily Griffith Wilson, twenty-five years old, very confused and very pregnant, might have been found in the Wilson House hotel kitchen as the afternoon cold settled in outside and the steam formed on the windowpanes. She was preparing to bake an apple pie, cutting the apples and then rolling out the crust, and keeping an eye on the popcorn just warming up in a cast-iron pan over the woodstove. The big north-facing room where she worked smelled of cooking: of flour and the sweetness of apples, of a batch of sugar cookies and the sausage frying for the stuffing. Usually, she found these smells delicious, but this afternoon they were nauseating. Pregnancy ruined everything, she thought. Emily could hear the others thumping around upstairs, Grandma Wilson and Gilly, and the rhythmic thunk, thunk of someone splitting wood in the big shed where the sheep and goats were penned in for the winter. Up the hill a dog barked. Out the back windows the kitchen garden, where a few pumpkins still lazed against the cold earth, was framed by the white columns of the porch, the big pine tree, and the road that followed Mad Tom Brook down to the peaked roof of the railroad station. She could hear the trains going through three times each day -- the Green Mountain Flyer and the midnight sleeper when she was up late. The track came down from Montreal, past Dorset Pond just a few miles north, then right past the general store and the cheese factory, and then down the valley toward Manchester Depot and Manchester Village on the way to Albany, where you could change for Boston or New York City. Grover Cleveland was president, New York City police had just cracked down on an illicit distillery, and Oscar Hammerstein was packing them in at his Olympia Theater. Across the green, as night fell and the pains made it harder for her to stay and work at the kitchen table, Emily could just see the parsonage where she and Gilly were planning to live once the baby was born. Then the lights went on in her parents' little white house with the cheerful red door and the green shutters. They would be over for dinner tomorrow, but the thought of them at prayer in the cozy little parlor where she had grown up made the pains subside for a moment. Not that their life had been perfect -- life was always hard -- but right now, alone for a moment, she remembered the innocent girl she had once been. Things had seemed so simple then. Slow-moving oxen pulled the great blocks of marble out of the mountains and loaded them onto railroad cars. There was maple sugaring in the spring and apple picking and cider in the fall. There was the General Store, where Mr. Barrows always smiled at her; the town meetings over in Dorset Village; the Grange Hall, where men argued about politics; the blacksmith shop where the family horses got new shoes; and the cobbler where she went for her own new shoes. On the other side of the tracks were the marble mills where the blocks were cut into the slabs that were as common as grass all over town. East Dorset marble was the best marble in the world. There was