Hawtree, Christopher. "Peter Benchley: He was fascinated by the sea, but his bestselling novel tapped into a primeval fear of the deep", The Guardian, February 14, 2006. Accessed February 15, 2011. "In 1971, he was asked by Tom Congdon, an editor at the publishers Doubleday, if he had anything in mind for a book, and he pitched this as a "long story"; he produced a hundred pages, and, with a $1000 advance, he reworked it steadily, holing up to do so, during the winter, in a room above the Pennington Furnace Supply Co in Pennington, New Jersey, and, by summer, in an old turkey coop at Stonnington, Connecticut."
