I prided myself on knowing more about sharks than the general populace, but I succumbed nevertheless to anecdotal evidence and accepted it—or them, for the anecdotes were legion—as truth. Did sharks attack boats? Of course they did. Did they target humans? You bet. I had read about dozens of shark attacks. Did they stay in one area, killing and killing again, until either they were caught and killed or they finished off the food supply? Darn right. Remember the shark that went up a New Jersey river in 1916 and killed four people? Time and again, I confidently assured interviewers that every single incident of shark behavior described in Jaws (the book, remember, not the movie) had actually happened—not all at once, not by the same shark, but over the years and in some sea somewhere in the world. I was correct, too; every episode described in the book had happened … just not for the reasons I had posited, nor with the results I had imagined.

It would be years before I would learn the biological and behavioral truths about sharks in general and great whites in particular. I learned them slowly, firsthand, often in company with scientists or fishermen or divers, and each discovery was fascinating, albeit humbling. One of the first lessons I learned was that sharks not only don’t seek out and attack human beings, they avoid humans whenever possible—we are, after all, large, noisy, ugly aliens that, for all a shark knows, may pose mortal danger—and bite them very rarely. They don’t even like the taste of us, and great whites often spit humans out because they’re too bony and fat-free (compared to seals, that is).

With knowledge accumulated from dozens of expeditions and hundreds of dives and countless encounters with sharks of many kinds came the realization that I could never write Jaws today. I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be, an animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the sea, and an animal that we may—if we don’t change our destructive behaviors—extinguish from the face of the earth.

As Jaws was being readied for publication, my ambitions for it were modest, to say the least. I knew it couldn’t possibly be commercially successful. For one thing, it was a first novel, and, with rare exceptions like Gone with the Wind, first novels tended to languish, unread, on bookstore shelves. For another, it was a first novel about a fish, and I couldn’t think of any novels about fish that had achieved critical or commercial success. Furthermore, I knew for certain that no one would ever make a movie from the book because it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark, and moviemaking technology was nowhere near good enough to create a believable model or mechanical version.

The book was published in the spring of 1974, to generally favorable reviews. A few readers and reviewers went delightfully overboard. Fidel Castro told an interviewer for National Public Radio that Jaws (Tiburon in its Spanish editions) was a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism. Other critics described it as an allegory about Watergate and a classic story of male bonding.