T.P. McWhorter was born Talbot Porter McWhorter in Jefferson City Missouri on July 23rd, 1941. He was born the fourth of seven children including two brothers and four sisters. McWhorter's father, Leopold, the first born son of Scottish immigrants, was a railroad man who travelled up and down Missouri train lines making repairs and handled upkeep for the lines throughout the state.
Leopold fought in WWI as a foot soldier for the United States from the beginning of the war to sometime in 1917. It was during that time he developed the skill of engineering to become a railroad technician. By the time T.P. was born, Leopold was not home much and McWhorter's mother mostly raised T.P. and rest of the the family and took care of their small farm. McWhorter's mother, Katerina, was born in the Ukraine and met Leopold after WWI in Philadelphia in 1925 when Leopold was working for the railroad there. Besides running the small farm where they raised a couple of cattle, chickens and some sheep for family food, Katerina worked as a washer woman who was brought the clothes of the local upper class residents of Jefferson City. She was well-loved around the town, and Leopold was the most respected train technician that ever worked on the line. Both died tragically during a weekend vacation when their climbing harness rope snapped while the two were shackled together on the sheer face of a small mountain in Colorado. They fell nearly a thousand feet before they hit the ground.
It was T.P.'s oldest sister, Griselda, who became the head of the family after news of the parents' demise reached the farm by telegram. T.P. was emotionally crushed at not being able to say goodbye to his mother whom he was always close to. He developed obsessive compulsive behavior including repetitive handwashing remeniscent of Howard Hughes, and the paranoid agoraphobic behavior that confined Jim Backus to his home for years. Writing became T.P.'s world where he lost himself in pages of unending fantasy. T.P.'s stories of imaginary worlds, characters that were riddled with obsessions and addictions, dominated the boy's life for seven years before he was forced from his home when Griselda sold the family farm out of selfishness to spend money on fancy clothes and shoes.
After the farm was sold, T.P. and his two brothers moved into a small house. His brothers supported him as he still remained an agoraphobic obsessive hand-washer, and soon developed other paranoid delusional behaviors that included a great fear of transforming into anything other than who he was already, which is symptomatic of the hand-washing compulsion, and also a hatred for odd numbers. It was only when his brother Utgrad came home drunk one night and fell asleep smoking and the house caught fire that snapped T.P. back to reality after he saved Utgrad and his other brother Remo from their imminent deaths. Like being splashed with water while in a daze, the fire was a wake-up call to T.P. and he immediately lost all of his compulsions as he embraced life to the fullest and became an adventurer, traveller, and writer. For the last several years, T.P. has been living on the island of Malta writing short stories and doing archeological digs trying to uncover the link between the Maltese people and the mythical island of Atlantis.