`Jaws' author put fame behind conservation efforts
New York Times News Service
February 13, 2006
Peter Benchley, whose 1974 novel "Jaws" turned shark attacks into a national obsession and who later used what he called his "fish story" to help promote oceanic conservation, died Sunday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 65.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs, said his wife, Wendy.
Even before it was published, "Jaws," Mr. Benchley's first novel, was becoming a sensation as word trickled out of the publishing business that a blockbuster story was on the way. Movie rights were bought, magazine articles commissioned, and the great white shark was thrust into the spotlight in a way that foreshadows the current national obsession with "The Da Vinci Code."
For several years in the mid-1970s, the great white shark was the subject of essays and comedy skits, swimmers teased one another with the foreboding "baa-dum" theme music from the Steven Spielberg film and lifeguards and town elders tried to assure vacationers that it was safe to go into the water.
Mr. Benchley, who found himself enduring the wrath of Jacques Cousteau, said in later years that he regretted making the great white into a villain. But he always was fascinated with the sea, having spent summers as a youth on Nantucket Island, Mass. He returned there again and again for topics for his books, including "The Deep" in 1976, "The Island" in 1979 and "Beast," a 1991 thriller about a giant squid that is driven to attacking humans because its natural food sources have been depleted.
Mr. Benchley came from a home with deep literary roots, the son of the novelist Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Robert Benchley, the humorist and drama editor of The New Yorker and Life magazines.
It was while working as a freelance writer that Mr. Benchley was invited to lunch by Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, who asked if he had any ideas for a novel. As he later described it, he said: "I've been thinking about a novel about a great white shark that appears off a Long Island resort and afflicts it." The idea came from a news article he had read about a fisherman who caught a 4,500-pound great white off Long Island in 1964.
Congdon agreed, and acquired the right to publish the book for a small advance. Mr. Benchley wrote in a rented room over a garage in Pennington, N.J., said author John McPhee, a longtime friend.
"He wrote this book out of his imagination--about a shark, and that led him into a million other places, an interest in natural history, and made him into quite an expert about the subject," McPhee said.
Mr. Benchley's conservation work included serving as a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund and working with Wild Aid, traveling to teach about sharks and to try to warn against the practice of killing sharks for their fins.
For their 40th wedding anniversary last year, Mr. Benchley and his wife went diving, looking for great whites in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego.
New York Times News Service
February 13, 2006
Peter Benchley, whose 1974 novel "Jaws" turned shark attacks into a national obsession and who later used what he called his "fish story" to help promote oceanic conservation, died Sunday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 65.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs, said his wife, Wendy.
Even before it was published, "Jaws," Mr. Benchley's first novel, was becoming a sensation as word trickled out of the publishing business that a blockbuster story was on the way. Movie rights were bought, magazine articles commissioned, and the great white shark was thrust into the spotlight in a way that foreshadows the current national obsession with "The Da Vinci Code."
For several years in the mid-1970s, the great white shark was the subject of essays and comedy skits, swimmers teased one another with the foreboding "baa-dum" theme music from the Steven Spielberg film and lifeguards and town elders tried to assure vacationers that it was safe to go into the water.
Mr. Benchley, who found himself enduring the wrath of Jacques Cousteau, said in later years that he regretted making the great white into a villain. But he always was fascinated with the sea, having spent summers as a youth on Nantucket Island, Mass. He returned there again and again for topics for his books, including "The Deep" in 1976, "The Island" in 1979 and "Beast," a 1991 thriller about a giant squid that is driven to attacking humans because its natural food sources have been depleted.
Mr. Benchley came from a home with deep literary roots, the son of the novelist Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Robert Benchley, the humorist and drama editor of The New Yorker and Life magazines.
It was while working as a freelance writer that Mr. Benchley was invited to lunch by Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, who asked if he had any ideas for a novel. As he later described it, he said: "I've been thinking about a novel about a great white shark that appears off a Long Island resort and afflicts it." The idea came from a news article he had read about a fisherman who caught a 4,500-pound great white off Long Island in 1964.
Congdon agreed, and acquired the right to publish the book for a small advance. Mr. Benchley wrote in a rented room over a garage in Pennington, N.J., said author John McPhee, a longtime friend.
"He wrote this book out of his imagination--about a shark, and that led him into a million other places, an interest in natural history, and made him into quite an expert about the subject," McPhee said.
Mr. Benchley's conservation work included serving as a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund and working with Wild Aid, traveling to teach about sharks and to try to warn against the practice of killing sharks for their fins.
For their 40th wedding anniversary last year, Mr. Benchley and his wife went diving, looking for great whites in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego.
