Peter Benchley.

Robert Benchley’s grandson, Peter Benchley, was born on May 8, 1940 in New York City to children’s book author Nathaniel Benchley. He attended the Allen-Stevenson School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from Harvard University in 1961.

After Harvard, Benchley worked as a reporter at the Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek, and later served as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, writing difficult speeches about the Vietnam War.

Benchley’s breakthrough came with his first novel Jaws, published in 1974, which sold over 20 million copies. Director Steven Spielberg adapted it into the 1975 film Jaws, starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw. Benchley earned $175,000 for the book and screenplay, with escalator clauses bringing his total film rights to about $250,000, plus 10% of net profits, totaling approximately $10 million.

He followed with other ocean-themed novels like The Deep and The Island, both of which were adapted into films with less success. Benchley also appeared as an interviewer in the film Jaws and made cameo appearances in other productions. He received additional income of $1 million from foreign sales of Jaws as of 1976.

After the hysteria surrounding great white sharks, Benchley became a dedicated environmentalist, learning about the species and publicly admitting he would not have written Jaws in the same way given what he later knew about shark behavior and fragility.

Peter Benchley married Winifred Brownell Wesson on September 19, 1964, and they had three children: Tracy, Clayton, and Christopher. The couple remained together until his death from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in Princeton, New Jersey on February 11, 2006. He was a grandfather to five grandchildren.

Benchley’s legacy is complex: his novel Jaws both terrified millions and inspired a wave of shark exploitation films, but he later worked to protect great white sharks. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2018 in the Arts and Letters category. He also donated his time to conservation efforts and publicly expressed regret for demonizing sharks. Today, Benchley is remembered both as the author of one of the most popular thrillers of the 20th century and as an unlikely conservationist who helped change public perception of sharks.