Jaws

Jaws was published by Doubleday in 1974 and was Peter Benchley's first novel. Benchley had been a journalist and a speechwriter, and the book grew out of his interest in shark attacks after he read about Frank Mundus, a fisherman from Montauk who hunted large sharks for sport in the 1960s. Doubleday commissioned the novel in 1971 on the strength of a proposal, which is how a first novel by a magazine writer ended up as one of the best-selling books of the decade.

The novel's real subject is a town. The mayor, the police chief, the newspaper and the shopkeepers are all written as people with interests, and the argument about whether to close the beach is conducted in the language of money and elections. Benchley places the shark attacks inside that argument rather than above it, so the first half reads as a civic drama with a body count, and the second half changes register entirely for the voyage, where the three men are given their own reasons for being on the boat.

The film version followed in 1975 and made the story a permanent part of the culture, and the author spent much of the rest of his life speaking about shark conservation in response to what the book and film had done to the animal's reputation. Benchley wrote several more novels about the sea, including The Deep and Beast, and Jaws remains the book that shaped the way a summer beach story is told.

The novel is also a first book by a writer who had never published fiction, which is worth remembering whenever it is compared with a film that has been in the culture for fifty years.