Michael Schumacher, author of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton biographies, dies aged 75 | US news
Michael Schumacher, a Wisconsin author who produced a wide range of works ranging from biographies of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and musician Eric Clapton to tales of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, has died. He was 75 years old.
Schumacher’s daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed on Monday that her father died on December 29. She did not provide the cause of death.
Schumacher has produced biographies as varied as Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life; Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton; and Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg – a prominent poet and writer of the Beat Generation.
Other biographies included Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers and the Birth of the NBA and Will Eisner: The Life of a Dreamer in Comics. Eisner was one of the first cartoonists to work on American comic books and a pioneer of the concept of the graphic novel.
Although he was born in Kansas, Schumacher lived most of his life in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He studied political science at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, but left school with just one credit short of graduating, his daughter said. He turned to writing at a young age, she said, and essentially built two writing careers — one focused on biographies and the other on Great Lakes lore.
Living on the shores of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, Schumacher wrote accounts of how the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a storm on Lake Superior in 1975; a November 1913 storm that claimed the lives of more than 250 Great Lakes sailors; and how four sailors fought to survive on Lake Michigan after their ship sank during a storm in 1958.
Emily Joy Schumacher described her father as “a historical figure” and “a good human”. She said he worked by hand, filling countless loose-leaf notebooks and then transcribing them on a typewriter. She said she still remembers the sound of clicking keys.
“My father was a very generous person to people,” Emily Joy Schumacher said. “He loved people. He loved talking to people. He loved listening to people. He loved stories. When I think of my father, I think of him engaged in conversation, his coffee in his hand and his notebook.”
