Father Ralph Pfau was one of AA's four most-published and most-formative authors (along with Bill Wilson, Richmond Walker, and Ed Webster) during the new movement's earliest thirty years, during which it grew from only 100 members to almost 300,000.

In the first ten years Pfau spent working to spread AA, he said "I have traveled nearly 750,000 miles .... I have spoken before nearly two hundred thousand members of AA at retreats, meetings and conventions, and personally discussed problems with more than ten thousand alcoholics." He produced fourteen extremely popular books, called...