Author Michael Schumacher has died aged 75

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 Monday that her father had passed away on December 29. She did not provide a cause of death. 

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.

'When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.'

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

Emily described her father as 'a history person' and 'a good human'. 

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.

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. 

'When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.'

In an interview with Weber State University, Michael previously discussed his biography on film-maker Coppola and said: 'I 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.'

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.

'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.'

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’s Life in Comics and he wrote extensively about maritime disasters.

He was born in Kansas but spent most of his life in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Michael studied political science at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside but his daughter said he left there just one credit short of graduating.