Wisconsin author Michael Schumacher, who chronicled Ginsberg and Clapton, dies at 75

Michael J. Schumacher, a Wisconsin author who built two distinct writing careers — one chronicling the lives of cultural figures from Allen Ginsberg to Eric Clapton, and another documenting the maritime disasters of the Great Lakes — died Dec. 29. He was 75. His daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed his death Monday. No cause of death was provided.

Schumacher left behind biographies spanning American film, music, sports, and comics alongside accounts of some of the Great Lakes region’s most storied shipwrecks, making him an unusually wide-ranging chronicler of American life.

MADISON, Wis. — Michael J. Schumacher, a Wisconsin author who built parallel careers chronicling the lives of cultural figures and the maritime disasters of the Great Lakes, died Dec. 29. He was 75.

His daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed his death Monday. No cause of death was provided.

Schumacher’s biographies ranged widely across American life. His subjects included Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, musician Eric Clapton, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, NBA pioneer George Mikan, and comics artist Will Eisner. His biography of Ginsberg, “Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg,” brought sustained attention to one of the countercultural movement’s central figures. Other titles included “Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton,” “Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life,” “Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers & the Birth of the NBA,” and “Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.” Eisner was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in American comic books and a pioneer of the graphic novel concept, according to the Associated Press.

Schumacher’s second body of work centered on the Great Lakes. Living on the shores of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, he 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 in a storm in 1958.

Though born in Kansas, Schumacher lived most of his life in Kenosha. He studied political science at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside but left one credit short of graduating, his daughter said. He gravitated toward writing at a young age, she said, and by his own method: filling flip notebooks longhand and later transcribing the pages on a typewriter. His daughter said she still remembers the sound of the keys clacking.

“My dad was a very generous person with 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 dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.”

Emily Joy Schumacher described her father as “a history person” and “a good human.”