Peter Benchley is an American writer, author of Jaws, and screenwriter for the 1974 film of the same name. This film made a huge impact on the entire Hollywood film industry and became a truly iconic one. In addition to Jaws, Benchley wrote several other fiction books - The Island, The Abyss, The Thing, White Shark, etc.
Years before writing career
Peter Benchley was born on May 8, 1940 in New York into the family of university professor and writer Nathaniel Benchley.
Peter was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then at the prestigious Harvard University. The future writer graduated from this university in 1961, after which he was a reservist in the United States Marine Corps for some time.
In September 1964, Benchley married - Winfried Wisson became his legal wife. In 1967, she gave birth to a daughter from him, who was named Tracy. Later, the couple had two more children - sons Clayton and Christopher. Winfried and Peter lived together until 2006, that is, until the writer's death.
In the mid-sixties, Benchley worked as a journalist for the Washington Post and a column editor for Newsweek magazine. And from 1967 to 1969, he collaborated with the White House and wrote speeches for American President Lyndon Johnson.
Work on "Jaws"
Peter became a world-famous writer in the seventies. It all started when Doubleday editor John Congdon became interested in Benchley's idea of a novel about a great white shark terrorizing tourists on beaches.
Soon, the writer, having received a thousand dollars in advance, created the first 100 pages and sent them to the publisher. However, Kongdon was not satisfied with the result - he felt that there was too much humor in the manuscript, and therefore Benchley had to rewrite everything in a new way.
Jaws was first published in February 1974. This book immediately attracted the attention of the public and for quite a long time (more than forty weeks) was on the list of American bestsellers.
Universal producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck also liked Benchley's novel and acquired the rights to film it. As a result, in 1975 a thriller of the same name appeared on the screens - "Jaws". This film grossed more than $ 450 million at the box office (on a budget of 7 million) and, in fact, became the first blockbuster in the history of cinema. The director of this film was the famous Steven Spielberg, and Benchley in this case was announced as one of the authors of the script.
Subsequently, Universal released three sequels to Jaws. In addition, the Jaws theme park was built in Florida and operated until 2012.
Other novels by the author
Benchley's second novel, The Abyss, was released in 1976. It told the story of a married couple who decided to spend their honeymoon in Bermuda. There young people, scuba diving in the sea, found Spanish treasures of the 17th century, and this find turned into big trouble for them … This book was also filmed.
The third novel of the writer "The Island", published in 1979, tells the story of the descendants of pirates, torn from modern civilization, who terrorize ships in the Sargasso Sea. And this, according to the book, explains the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.
In the 1980s, Benchley wrote three more novels - Girl from the Sea of Cortez (1982), Q Clearance (1986) and Rummies (1989), but these were already less popular than the author's previous works.
In 1992, the writer released a new book. She received the capacious name "Creature". It described a new sea monster - a giant squid. And the main characters of the book in the course of the plot, of course, had to engage in a battle with this monster …
Finally, in 1994, Benchley's last fiction novel, The White Shark, appeared in stores. However, the story of a human-shark hybrid created by a Nazi scientist did not cause much excitement among American readers. Benchley never managed to replicate the success of his first novel, Jaws.
Benchley in the last years of his life
Benchley has been active in environmental protection since the mid-nineties. And instead of fiction, he began to write documentary works about the ocean and sharks. One such piece is a book called Shark Trouble. In it, the author advocates the preservation of the population of underwater predators and writes in general about the need for careful handling of the fragile marine ecosystem.
The famous writer died of lung pathology in 2006.
