Michael Schumacher, the author of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton’s biographies, has died at the age of 75.
His daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed on Monday that her father died on December 29. She has not provided a cause of death.
‘My dad was a very generous person with people. He loved people. He loved talking to people. He loved listening to people. He loved stories,’ Emily said in a statement.
‘When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.’
Michael’s work includes Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life, Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton and Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, a Beat Generation poet.
Emily described her father as ‘a good human’ and said he worked longhand, filling countless flip notebooks and later transcribing them on a typewriter.
In previous interviews, Michael has discussed his work with film-maker Coppola, detailing how much he ‘admired his work’.
‘I wanted to write a serious biography. So when he jumped on board, all of a sudden I was getting serious interviews not only with people who were related to family members, but with people who had worked with him and had really interesting things to contribute,’ he told Weber State University.
Discussing his process of writing, he added: ‘I prefer to not go into a biography with a lot of preconceived ideas. Let the story tell itself.
‘You know a bit about [your subjects] because you have been reading their work, or listening to it, in the case of [Phil] Ochs or [Eric] Clapton, or watching it, in Coppola’s case, during a large portion of your life.
‘You admire them. You know what you like and what you don’t like, and you have some ideas about what he must have thought when he wrote this or that…
‘But if you go into it with preconceived ideas, you would try, I believe, to mold it into something you believed. It doesn’t matter what I believe; it doesn’t matter what poems of Allen Ginsberg I believe are great, or not great. That’s not my job. My job was to present Allen the best I could as a man and as a poet.’
Throughout his career, Schumacher also wrote sports and comics history.
This included Mr Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers & the Birth of the NBA and Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.
He also wrote extensively about maritime disasters.
Born in Kansas, the writer spent most of his life in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he studied political science at the University of Wisconsin.
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