50 Years Ago, ‘Jaws’ Hit Bookstores, Capturing the Angst of a Generation

In 1973, the first chapter of an unpublished novel was photocopied and passed around the Manhattan offices of Doubleday & Co. with a note. “Read this,” it dared, “without reading the rest of the book.”

Those who accepted the challenge were treated to a swift-moving tale of terror, one that begins with a young woman taking a postcoital dip in the waters off Long Island. As her lover dozes on the beach, she’s ravaged by a great white shark.

“The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water,” the passage read. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.”

Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, had circulated the bloody, soapy excerpt to drum up excitement for his latest project: a thriller about a massive fish stalking a small island town, written by a young author named Peter Benchley.

Congdon’s gambit worked. No one who read the opening could put the novel down. All it needed was a grabby title. Benchley had spent months kicking around potential names (“Dark White”? “The Edge of Gloom”?). Finally, just hours before deadline, he found it.

“Jaws,” he wrote on the manuscript’s cover page.

When it was released in early 1974, Benchley’s novel kicked off a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry — and in Hollywood. “Jaws” spent months on the best-seller lists, turned Benchley from an unknown to a literary celebrity and, of course, became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting 1975 film adaptation.