Willow Auction House is proud to present the personal collection of Peter Benchley (1940–2006), the acclaimed author, screenwriter, diver, and ocean conservationist best known for Jaws.

This intimate collection offers a personal look at Benchley’s life and career, featuring Jaws production photographs and memorabilia, original typewriters, personal books and research materials, awards, photographs, diving suits and personal effects. Highlights include Benchley’s 1975 Jaws one-sheet, original Jaws T-shirts - including one gifted to him by Steven Spielberg - and an extensive selection of material documenting the making and enduring legacy of Jaws.

Benchley’s early career included working as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, represented here by photographs and presentation pieces associated with Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson, including signed and inscribed photographs presented to Benchley. The collection also features a selection of historical manuscripts and documents, including a 17th-century royal decree signed by Philip II of Spain, documents associated with Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, a 13th-century French vellum Bible leaf, and an early American newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy.

Beyond Jaws, the collection reflects Benchley’s lifelong passion for the ocean, exploration, and maritime art, with works including Christopher Blossom’s Ship Allerton, Thomas Hoyne’s First and Saucy, and marine works by Richard Ellis, alongside marine photography, maps, and maritime artifacts. Particularly compelling are objects connected directly to Benchley’s own adventures, including his personal diving equipment, Henderson titanium wetsuit, shark teeth, fossils, and archaeological artifacts recovered by Peter and Wendy Benchley, including material from Bermuda shipwrecks. A passionate ocean conservationist, Benchley became increasingly concerned that Jaws had contributed to public fear of sharks; he subsequently dedicated much of his later life to educating the public about sharks and advocating for their protection. Photographs documenting Benchley diving with sharks and manta rays further capture his lifelong commitment to understanding and preserving the marine world.

Together, these 300 lots offer a rare glimpse into Peter Benchley’s life as a writer, speechwriter, diver, explorer, collector, and advocate for the oceans. From iconic Jaws memorabilia and literary material to fine art, historical documents, diving equipment, and personally recovered artifacts, there is something for every collector and admirer of Peter Benchley and the legendary film.

Half a century ago, a great white shark swam out of a first novel and into the world’s imagination. It made millions of people afraid to go into the water, and millions more curious about what lived beneath it. Now, for the first time, the private world of the man who created JAWS is opening its doors.

Willow Auction House is proud to present The Peter Benchley Collection, with nearly 300 lots offered at auction for the first time. Together they tell a remarkable American story. A writer is born into a celebrated literary family. His first novel becomes a cultural phenomenon, then one of the most influential films ever made. And the author spends the rest of his life protecting the sharks and the seas that made him famous.

The Benchley family has kept these things for twenty years, with gratitude for the life they record. JAWS opened the ocean to Peter and to the whole family, who followed him onto the water and into the work of protecting it. To celebrate that life, the family is giving all net proceeds from the auction to five ocean conservation organizations that carry his legacy forward: the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards, WildAid, Beneath the Waves, Blue Frontier and the Environmental Defense Fund, for which Peter was a voice for many years. Every bid supports the ocean he loved.

Among the lots are the typewriters on which Peter wrote, an original JAWS T-shirt given to the film crew by Steven Spielberg, and the wetsuit Peter wore on three decades of expeditions beneath the sea. Here too are the paintings and artifacts he lived among, with maps, manuscripts, historic documents and archaeological treasures that reach back centuries and fed his imagination. These are more than objects from a celebrated writer’s life. They are pieces of the story behind all his books, JAWS among them, and the extraordinary life he lived. The sale is arranged as a walk through that life, from the walls of his home to the floor of the sea.

The storyteller’s walls. The sale opens where Peter’s story does, with his father. Nathaniel Benchley was a novelist and a painter, and three of his canvases hang here beside Al Hirschfeld’s drawing of the Benchley family and portraits of Peter himself. Around them is the sea Peter kept on land: Christopher Blossom’s Ship Allerton, Thomas Hoyne’s First and Saucy, antique maps of the West Indies and Bermuda, and engravings from the age of sail.

The desk and the travels. A storyteller needs creative sparks, and Peter surrounded himself with them. JAWS opened the world to him, and for three decades he and Wendy dove it, on National Geographic assignments and expeditions to Bermuda, Tahiti, Komodo, South Africa and Papua New Guinea, where the 1987 “Ghosts of War” expedition with photographer David Doubilet took them to the sunken warships of Milne Bay. From every trip they brought home treasure: carved figures and weapons from the Sepik River and the Highlands, Pre-Columbian ceramics, bronze trade weights from Asia, a dragon from Komodo. Peter’s desk accessories sit here among them.

The papers. Exeter, Harvard and Newsweek led Peter to the White House, where he wrote speeches for Lyndon B. Johnson. The signed and inscribed photographs from President and Lady Bird Johnson come from that seminal moment. Beside them are documents from the age of exploration that Peter kept within arm’s reach: a 13th-century French vellum Bible leaf, manuscripts signed by Isabella of Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip II of Spain, and an early issue of The Massachusetts Spy. Peter wrote about people who went looking for what lay beyond the horizon. These were a daily shot of adrenaline for the stories still to come.

The typewriters and the “fish book”. Storytelling was in Peter’s blood. His grandfather, Robert Benchley, was the humorist of Algonquin Round Table fame. His father challenged a teenage Peter to sit alone in a room each summer and produce a thousand words a day, and summers fishing off Nantucket primed his imagination for a big fish adventure. When Johnson chose not to run again, Peter was out of a job. But he had been mulling two stories for years, one about a great white shark that would not leave a summer beach town alone, the other about pirates in the Caribbean. His wife, Wendy, doubted either would fly. Nevertheless, in the back room of a rickety old furnace repair shop in Pennington, New Jersey, he wrote his “fish book.” The typewriters, hats, briefcases and personal library here are the workshop of that storyteller.

From the set of JAWS. The production photographs, the 1975 one-sheet and the original JAWS T-shirts, the ones Steven Spielberg gave his crew, come from the summer of 1974, when Peter’s story left the page. As the novel climbed the New York Times bestseller list, David Brown and Richard Zanuck of Universal Studios snapped up the movie rights, and filming began on Martha’s Vineyard, which became the fictional Amity Island. Peter co-wrote the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb and played a Hitchcock-style cameo as the Amity reporter on the beach, coached by Spielberg, then 27 and unknown, while the mechanical shark known as “Bruce” rusted in the salt water and the bullhorn blared, day after day, “The shark is NOT working.” The film opened in June 1975 as the first summer blockbuster, frightening the world and fascinating it in equal measure. Here too are editions of JAWS in a dozen languages, the JawsFest Key to Amity, and 50th-anniversary copies signed by Wendy Benchley.

The books that followed. The pirates got their turn. Peter went on to write a dozen novels, among them The Deep, The Island, Beast and The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, his love letter to the ocean. Shark Trouble, his account of a life among sharks, is the closest he came to telling his own story. The posters, production photographs and foreign editions here trace that career, and the awards that close the section include his induction into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame and his Sports Emmy.

The diver’s locker. Then the story changed, and Peter changed with it. After the filming on Martha’s Vineyard, and before the movie opened in June 1975, ABC’s The American Sportsman challenged him to go cage diving with living great whites at Dangerous Reef in South Australia. He surfaced awe-struck and resolved to help protect this magnificent fish and its ocean home. Peter and Wendy were horrified that some people’s first reaction to JAWS was to go out and hunt sharks. They were heartened by thousands of letters from scientists, teachers and children captivated by JAWS and wanting to be like Hooper, the marine scientist played by Richard Dreyfuss. JAWS jump-started shark research, transforming our understanding of sharks and their vital role in a healthy ocean. The Benchleys spent the rest of their lives using it as a platform to become a voice for sharks and the sea, on dozens of expeditions and films for National Geographic, ABC and others. The Henderson titanium wetsuit, the scuba gear, the National Geographic jackets and the photographs of Peter with sharks and manta rays show that second act, alongside underwater photography by David Doubilet, Peter’s friend and colleague on National Geographic assignments from Papua New Guinea to the great white sharks of South Africa, and shark portraits by Richard Ellis.

The deep. The sale ends on the sea floor. Great white and megalodon teeth, fossils, Spanish colonial salvage, a 17th-century Port Royal flagon, and the Bermuda shipwreck artifacts Peter brought up himself are what he carried home from a life given to the ocean. Peter’s favorite passage came from Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, written on a Cape Cod beach in 1928. Animals, Beston wrote, “move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” The man who gave the world its most famous shark spent the rest of his life learning to see it that way, and asking the rest of us to do the same.

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