Early Life
McWilliams was born to a Roman Catholic family and raised outside of Detroit in Allen Park, Michigan. After attending Eastern Michigan University, he read widely and was a fan of Paul Krassner's periodical The Realist and Albert Ellis' rational emotive therapy. After experimenting with yoga and LSD he also did group therapy with Melba Colgrove, Ph.D.
McWilliams studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and attended Maharishi International University. He wrote The TM Book in 1975 with Denise Denniston, which was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks. In 1976, he wrote TM: An Alphabetical Guide to the Transcendental Meditation Program with Denise Denniston and Nat Goldhaber. He later wrote TM with Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D. The two also co-wrote How to Heal Depression. McWilliams was next active in Erhard Seminars Training with Werner Erhard, whom he greatly admired, and also Stuart Emory's "Actualizations" large-group awareness training before meeting John-Roger in the fall of 1978 and its "Insights" program.
McWilliams wrote, directed and produced a campy film parody titled The Greatest Story Overtold (later released as The Thorn, 1974), using the pseudonym Peter Alexander. He wrote nearly 40 books that he self-published under the names Versemonger Press and Prelude Press, including Surviving the Loss of a Love (1971), The Personal Computer Book (1982), The Word Processing Book (1982), Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life in School but Didn't (1990), and Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society (1993). Many of these were liberally sprinkled with selected quotations to illuminate, often humorously, the points he made.
Life 101 and a few subsequent books were also credited to John-Roger (Roger Delano Hinkins), the leader of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness and McWilliams's spiritual advisor during that time. McWilliams later repudiated the movement, claiming to be the sole author of the books, which clearly are written in his style.
McWilliams was a budding photographer and a collection of his own photographs were published in October 1992. In the collection of photographs McWilliams is pictured with the family he writes about in Life 101. McWilliams' photographs document the Bohn family's trip to "The Field of Dreams" in Dyersville Iowa in 1990.
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