The world’s oceans, they cover a great majority of our planet. According to scientists, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about what’s in the waters of our own planet. Even with advancing science we still don’t know very much about them. So imagine what it was like back around the 1970’s, it was already a time of great fear, and to some extent, paranoia in the United States with the threat of nuclear war and multiple other new threats emerging. Surprisingly, although it was known that there were dangerous things in the sea, nobody seemed to pay that much mind to it. All that changed when a man named Peter Benchley wrote a book called Jaws. This book, the resulting movie, and his literary works to follow opened up a new aspect that no one had ever thought of. It was a new breed of terror that came from the last place anyone ever had expected, the ocean itself.
It is because of this book that Peter Benchley really became a household name. Born May 8th, 1940 in New York, NY he was raised in a family of writers. His father Nathaniel Benchley was a known writer of children’s books and his grandfather was a well-known humorist named Robert Benchley. He spent his childhood writing and even got paid in his teens to write during his vacations. He got a very formal writer’s education studying at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and attaining his major in English from Harvard. He wrote a sort of autobiography of himself as his very first published book entitled Time and a Ticket in 1964. Before he even got to the ideas for the books he’s now famous for, he spent time in several other writing positions including some for the Washington Post, Newsweek, and he even served as a speech writer for President Lyndon B. ...
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... over the course of his life, Peter Benchley passed away in February 2006, the legacy ending of the man who made generations afraid to get in the water.
Works Cited
Swann, Christopher. "Peter Benchley: Overview." Contemporary Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Mar. 2012
The Wilson Quarterly. 30.2 (Spring 2006) p120. Word Count: 155. From Literature Resource Center.
"Peter Benchley." (2007): n. page. Web. 4 Apr. 2012.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2007-A-Co/Benchley-Peter.html
Benchley, Peter. The Beast. Random House, 1991. Print.
Benchley, Peter. Shark Trouble. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003. Print.
Benchley, Peter. White Shark. Random House, 1994. Print.
"Biography for Peter Benchley." n.pag. Web. 5 Apr 2012. .
more to define his directorial approach at an early stage of his career. In contrast, Peter Benchley’s novel is engrossed with character development, and unnecessary sub-plots to entertain the theater audience. At the direction of Stephen Spielberg, the adaption of the novel will be recreated for cinematic appeal, leave the basic plot intact and the fear will come from conflicting sources. To create fear Benchley will rely on prose to stimulate the imagination of the reader. For instance, the writer
Summary by Eric Dillon Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a branch off the novel Jaws written by Peter Benchley . The Novel was written in 1974 receiving a best sellers award and therefore setting up for a movie just one year later in 1975, which soon invented the phrase “blockbuster”which simply is to gross over 100 million dollars. Since this was a highly publicized and successful novel Steven Spielberg was held to a high expectation for this movie to be an ultimate hit. The book and the movie have
many fall short. One of the many reasons for this is that people flat out fear sharks. Why would they want to help an animal that has been portrayed as a dangerous and seeking to kill humans? The author of Jaws makes a point in saying he had no idea the impact his book and film would make on todays beachgoers. This attitude towards sharks needs to stop for shark conservation efforts to really take off. Although many people fear sharks, almost a quarter of a million pe... ... middle of paper ...