Discover the Best Books Written by Peter McWilliams

Peter Alexander McWilliams (August 5, 1949 – June 14, 2000) was an American self-help author who advocated for the legalization of marijuana. McWilliams was born to a Roman Catholic family in Detroit, one of two sons of Henry G. and Mary (née Taormina; later Fadden) McWilliams. His father worked as a supervisor at a drugstore and his mother was a part-time salesperson.

He attended Allen Park High School and Eastern Michigan University and later enrolled at Maharishi International University. At the age of 17, he wrote a collection of poems called Come Love with Me and Be My Life, which he self-published under the name Versemonger Press. McWilliams 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 Denniston and Nat Goldhaber. He wrote TM with Harold H. Bloomfield and later co-wrote the book How to Heal Depression. 

He wrote nearly 40 books including Surviving the Loss of a Love (1971), The Personal Computer Book (1982), and Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life in School but Didn't (1990). His 1982 book, The Word Processing Book: A Short Course in Computer Literacy, was published during the "computer revolution" and was "highly successful." McWilliams was a photographer, and a collection of his own photographs were published in October 1992 in a book titled Portraits – A Book of Photographs by Peter McWilliams. McWilliams was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1996.