Blood in the water. How N.J. became a great American shark state.

To read Monster sharks have returned to the Jersey Shore. Is it a nightmare or a new golden age? , click here .

Peter Benchley thought he had one last shot.

So the aspiring novelist from a family of writers pitched a whopper.

A great white shark! Terrorizing a beach town! Eating swimmers alive!

“Oh gosh, honey,” his widow, Wendy Benchley, remembers thinking, “I just don’t think that’s going to be a really big novel.”

But Doubleday picked up the fictional tale, Benchley hunkered down in a makeshift office at a Pennington furnace company and the rest is history. The New Jersey author crafted the opening of the shark book that became the shark movie that became the single most influential piece of shark content in human history.

The legend of how sharks became sharks ,