The Island (31 page)

After graduation from Harvard University, Peter Benchley took a year off and traveled around the world. The result of the trip was
Time and a Ticket,
a nonfiction book published in 1964. He later worked as a reporter for the
Washington Post,
as a radio-TV editor for
Newsweek
and as a speechwriter during the Johnson Administration. He then became a freelancer and took on assignments that included a stint as TV commentator with the Newsweek Broadcast Service and with WPIX-TV in New York.

In the early 1970s, his knowledge about sharks—much of it learned during boyhood summers on Nantucket—led him to blend fact and fiction in
Jaws,
a novel hailed by critics as “a stunning book” (Chicago
Tribune Book World
) and “a spectacular debut” (John Barkham). Benchley’s growing interest in history and marine archeology led to his second novel,
The Deep.

Then, in 1977, some startling Coast Guard statistics came to Benchley’s attention: over three recent years, more than six hundred seagoing boats had inexplicably vanished, and with them, some two thousand people. Benchley began to research the problem, and slowly an idea for a new novel began to form. The result is
The Island.