William Todd Schultz

more photos (1)

William Todd Schultz’s Followers (32)

member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
member photo
IShita
1,935 books | 435 friends

Felicit...
1,264 books | 34 friends

Jamie P...
200 books | 14 friends

mina
0 books | 27 friends

Robert ...
1,190 books | 1,527 friends

Gary Ha...
463 books | 36 friends

Laura
992 books | 62 friends

Iva-Mar...
2,554 books | 361 friends

More friends…

William Todd Schultz

Goodreads Author


Born
Portland, OR, The United States
Website

Twitter

Genre

Member Since
January 2010


William Todd Schultz is a personality psychologist who specializes in profiles of artists. He’s published four books—Tiny Terror on Truman Capote (2011), An Emergency in Slow Motion on Diane Arbus (2011), Torment Saint on Elliott Smith (2013), and The Mind of the Artist (2021)—along with numerous articles and book chapters. He curates and edits the Oxford book series Inner Lives. He’s appeared in Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, The Spectator, Seattle Weekly, and other venues. In 2015, Schultz was awarded the Erikson Prize for Mental Health Media; from 2016-2017 he was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas; and in summer, 2021, he completed a Yaddo Artist Residency. He lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon.

Average rating: 3.69 · 1,281 ratings · 189 reviews · 6 distinct worksSimilar authors
Torment Saint: The Life of ...

3.71 avg rating — 880 ratings — published 2013 — 21 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
An Emergency in Slow Motion...

3.53 avg rating — 299 ratings — published 2011 — 9 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Tiny Terror: Why Truman Cap...

3.72 avg rating — 69 ratings — published 2011 — 10 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
The Mind of the Artist: Per...

4.50 avg rating — 20 ratings3 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
Handbook of Psychobiography

4.38 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 2005 — 5 editions
Rate this book
Clear rating
[(Torment Saint: The Life o...

by
0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
Rate this book
Clear rating
More books by William Todd Schultz…

William’s Recent Updates

Americana by Don DeLillo
" I had the exact same thought. no one could write these sentences today or maybe ever again. the several page monologue by the late night radio guy is ...more "
Americana by Don DeLillo
"makes me want to give up, then it went odd, but depicted something i get; no one has written sentences like this since. no one new could compete or compare"
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
" I actually read this! Finished just now.... Have many thoughts.... "
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
"How was that a hard riddle?!!?

This one is a mixed bag for me, on the one hand, I was expecting to really hate it, especially when the first-person narrative hit me on page one, line two, I thought sweet-lord-please-don’t-be-whiny, nevertheless it was" Read more of this review »
William Schultz rated a book it was amazing
The Names by Don DeLillo
Rate this book
Clear rating
Absolutely mesmerizing and hypnotic. The writing is brilliantly spare and clipped. It's my first DeLillo since grad school and it floored me. I was reading several other books at the same time and none compared for sheer artistry. High Rec. ...more
William Schultz rated a book liked it
Already Dead by Denis Johnson
Rate this book
Clear rating
I love Denis Johnson in the successes and in the failures because like all truly great artists he is 1) sincere and 2) creatively restless and eager to take risks. In all, I've read, I think, 10 of his books. My favs are probably unusual: Largesse of ...more
Torment Saint by William Todd Schultz
"Such a good book cried at the end "
Torment Saint by William Todd Schultz
"Both beautiful and tragic. I listened to elliot’s discography a lot whilst reading this book and I cried at one point when listening to ‘Angeles’ from Either/Or. It’s a real in depth peephole into his life and after reading it I can declare that gett" Read more of this review »
William Schultz rated a book really liked it
Chaos by Tom O'Neill
Rate this book
Clear rating
An engrossing read that instantly had me put down the other book I was reading (always a good sign). At times it can get rambling and too far into the weeds as different characters and plot lines are followed but for the most part you're carried alon ...more
William Schultz rated a book liked it
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Rate this book
Clear rating
Love Garcia Marquez always; but this book is odd in one important respect: there is (almost) no dialogue. So, it's entirely a storyteller spinning a yarn with all the action narrated. This fact has made me think of the purpose of dialogue in a novel. ...more
More of William's books…
Quotes by William Todd Schultz  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“And what the music elicits—in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it—is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween.”
William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith

“Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. “I don’t know who I am,” he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He’s a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with “one dimension dead.” He’s an invisible man with a see-through mind. He’s a junkyard full of false starts. He’s a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.”
William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith

“Once he gave her a Rothko book—an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The”
William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics posts views last activity  
Turn of a Page: Richard's Cat's Challenge - COMPLETE! 197 31 Nov 25, 2024 01:51PM  
Hooked on Books : Richard's 2024 Challenge Tracker 361 148 Jun 12, 2025 08:45AM  
Turn of a Page: Richard's Golden Girls-Complete 165 39 Jul 20, 2025 07:09AM  
Game Night: Richard's GOTW 25 in 25 63 23 Sep 30, 2025 12:28PM  
Hooked on Books : Richard's 2025 Challenge Tracker 395 137 Dec 20, 2025 10:49PM  
Crazy Challenge C...: Crazy Time - CLOSED TO NEW SIGN-UPS 172 101 Jan 31, 2026 05:50PM  
“For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.”
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

No comments have been added yet.