The Depths of Fear: Peter Benchley Essay examples -- Authors

The worlds oceans, they cover a great majority of our planet. According to scientists, we know more(prenominal) about the surface of the moon than we do about whats in the waters of our own planet. Even with advancing science we still dont know very much about them. So imagine what it was like back around the 1970s, 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 heading 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 childrens books and his granddad 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 perfunctory writers education studying at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and attaining his major in English from Harvard. He wrote a sort of memorial 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 hes 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. ... ... 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 CitedSwann, Christopher. Peter Benchley Overview. Contemporar y Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit St. James Press, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Mar. 2012The 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.htmlBenchley, Peter. The Beast. hit-or-miss 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. .