I grew up in New York City, attended school there through the eighth grade and then went on for secondary school to the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. I graduated from Harvard College, where I majored in English, in 1961. After college, I traveled around the world for a year and wrote a book called Time and a Ticket. Then I entered the Marine Corps in a six-month reserve program.

How did you get your start in writing?

I went to work for the Washington Post for about a half a year, then worked for Newsweek Magazine as the television editor for three years. That was 1964-67. In 1967 I went to work as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, where I stayed until January of 1969. I then became a freelance writer and worked for whoever would pay the bills. I wrote movie reviews, travel pieces, freelance television work, compiled synopses of the news for newspapers ... whatever I could do to earn a dollar.

How did you become interested in sharks?

I had been interested in sharks ever since I was a child growing up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. I knew a lot about sharks and had done a couple of magazine stories about them.

What influenced you to write JAWS?

In 1964, I read about a fisherman who had caught a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island, and I thought to myself, "What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?" That was the "seed" idea of JAWS, but I didn't actually pursue it until 1971. In those days I was working 2 or 3 days a week making a living doing television and newspaper stories. That paid me enough so that I could have 3 or 4 days a week to work on the shark story. I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be JAWS.

There was no particular influence. My idea was to tell my first novel as a sort of long story ... just to see if I could do it. I had been a freelance writer since I was 16, and I sold things to various magazines and newspapers whenever I could. I was a stringer at Harvard for the New York Herald Tribune; I contributed stories from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the newspaper.

Are your books based on past experiences?

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about. In JAWS I knew a great deal about sharks. In THE DEEP, I had been lucky enough to learn about Bermuda and to meet Teddy Tucker, a great Bermudan treasure diver, while doing a story for the National Geographic, and I learned about shipwrecks in Bermuda. THE DEEP was based on a real shipwreck called The Constellation, which was carrying a cargo of drugs during World War II. That particular ship sits on not one, but two old Spanish ships, wrecked hundreds of years earlier than The Constellation. I could only make one credible, so that's what I based THE DEEP on.

With BEAST, I had been fishing for giant squid for years with no luck. Again, it was a speculation, of a what if story. Almost all my stories are what if?'s.

Q Clearance was based on my years at the White House. So everything I have done has been based, more or less, on my own experience.

Did a sea creature ever attack you?

Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while. I was almost bitten by sharks a couple of times. The most serious time was in the Bahamas when an oceanic white-tip shark made a run at me because I was bleeding from my leg, having been caught in a fisherman's line. The shark tried to bite me and I tried to hit him in the eye with a stick, but instead I hit him in the mouth. He grabbed the stick, which was attached to my wrist, and ran away with it, shooting through the water and dragging me like a puppet behind him.

I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins. If you're careful, you don't have to worry about being attacked by sea creatures. I have been frightened by sharks and moray eels and killer whales and sperm whales, but never hurt.

Do you have any pets?

We have a dog, a two-year old yellow Labrador named Baggio.

What is your favorite book?

I have a lot of favorite books, but the two that made a big difference in my life were The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and James Boswell's Life of Johnson, the biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson. But there are many, many other books that I like as well.

Do you keep a writer's notebook?

I don't keep a writer's notebook. I seem to store things in my head and when the time comes, I am fortunate enough to have them come forward. Perhaps I should have been keeping a notebook. Of course, if I am doing a story for The National Geographic or some other magazine, or if I am actually doing basic research on a book, I certainly keep a notebook all the time.

What are you working on currently?

At the moment I'm doing stories for The National Geographic and other magazines, I'm doing films for the New England Aquarium that show in aquariums around the world. These are fifteen- to twenty-minute films on the ocean, designed to teach youngsters and adults alike about the importance of conservation in the ocean.

I also do a radio show every day on about 200 radio stations across the country and around the world, called The Ocean Report. It's a series of short ninety-second pieces about the condition of the oceans and what we can do to clean them up and preserve the animals. One of my primary concerns at the moment is that it is very hard to get people who live far from the seashore to understand how important the ocean is to all of us. Without the ocean, life on Earth could not exist as it does today, for the ocean renovates the air we breathe, it sustains the food we eat, and it nourishes the entire food chain. Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth. So water is the be-all and end-all of life as we know it. If we kill everything in the ocean, and if we pollute the ocean to a point where it can't sustain life, we're committing suicide. It's my hope that somehow we'll find a way to make people connect with the need to preserve the oceans and the creatures in them. It's to that end that I'm doing these films, programs, radio shows and other stories.

I don't have another book in mind at the moment. I'm involved in a television series called Peter Benchley's Amazon: twenty-two one-hour programs showing in syndication. You'll have to check your local listings. It is a drama, not a documentary, that involves seven survivors of an airplane crash in the Amazon jungle and the surprises they encounter as they try, first, to survive, and, then, to escape the jungle. I hope it will both entertain and teach a bit about the importance of the jungle-all the rain forests-to the survival of life on earth.

The Amazon is referred to as the "lungs of the Earth," and no wonder: Rain forests produce twenty percent of all the oxygen we breathe; of every breath we take, one-fifth of the oxygen is generated by rain forests, so they, too, are critically important in maintaining life. There are species of animals and plants in the rain forests that we have not discovered yet, and already we're extinguishing them. Who knows what diseases they might prevent, what lives they may save?