{"id":484,"date":"2026-01-06T13:55:28","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T13:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/?p=484"},"modified":"2026-01-06T13:55:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T13:55:28","slug":"celebrity-author-michael-schumacher-dead-acclaimed-writer-of-francis-ford-coppola-and-eric-clapton-biographies-passes-away-at-75-daily-mail-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/?p=484","title":{"rendered":"Celebrity author Michael Schumacher dead: Acclaimed writer of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton biographies\u00a0 passes away at 75 | Daily Mail Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Author Michael Schumacher<\/a>, who wrote the biographies of Francis Ford Coppola<\/a> and Eric Clapton, has died at the age of 75.<\/p>\n

His daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed on Monday that her father had passed away on December 29. She did not provide a cause of death.<\/p>\n

Emily said: ‘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.<\/p>\n

‘When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.’<\/p>\n

Michael’s books include Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker\u2019s Life; Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton; and Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, the influential Beat Generation poet.<\/p>\n

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Michael Schumacher, acclaimed author of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton biographies has sadly died aged 75<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Emily described her father as ‘a history person’ and ‘a good human’.<\/p>\n

She said he worked longhand, filling countless flip notebooks and later transcribing them on a typewriter. She said she still remembers the sound of the keys clacking.<\/p>\n

Adding: ‘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.<\/p>\n

‘When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.’<\/p>\n

In an interview with\u00a0Weber State University<\/a>, Michael previously discussed his biography on film-maker Coppola and said: ‘I admired his work.<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

When asked if he goes about writing a biography with an idea of ‘who’ he is writing about, he said: ‘Actually, I prefer to not go into a biography with a lot of preconceived ideas. Let the story tell itself.<\/p>\n

‘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.<\/p>\n

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Michael’s books include Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker\u2019s Life; Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton; and Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, the influential Beat Generation poet<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

‘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…<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

Schumacher also chronicled sports and comics history, wrote Mr Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers & the Birth of the NBA and Will Eisner: A Dreamer\u2019s Life in Comics and he wrote extensively about maritime disasters.<\/p>\n

He was born in Kansas but spent most of his life in Kenosha, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

Michael studied political science at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Parkside but his daughter said he left there just one credit short of graduating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Author Michael Schumacher, who wrote the biographies of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton, has died at the age of 75. His daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed on … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}